ABOUT

Carlen is a German woman’s name that translates to “free man.”

With reverence to this androgynous muse, Carlen Parfums seeks to dismantle bonds of gender, place, and time. The Carlen laboratory applies a haptic process to scent design, yielding a suite of poetic fragrances that echo instinct and industry, element and gestalt, discipline and disorder.

Thousands of years of experimentation have offered us the means to distill, mimic, or synthesize scents of increasing complexity and delicacy. Carlen Parfums, unfettered by naturally-occurring fragrances, draws inspiration from all planes of perception—dreams, utopias, altered states, celestial visions, the collective unconscious, and fine art. Deterritorializing the sense of smell, Carlen offers a balm to transcend your environment, or a lens to enhance it.

Informed by travel, botany, fashion, psychology, music, literature, and religious custom, Carlen draws rare materials into delicate infusions, delivering all distillations in radically minimalist vessels.