193. CHRISTOPHER SHELDRAKE ~ Your favorite perfumer's favorite perfumer.
Perfume Room
Emma Vernon
4.9 • 618 Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2025
⏱️ 64 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Christopher Sheldrake is the nose behind numerous fragrances other perfumers only wish they had created: Feminité du Bois, Ambre Sultan, Chergui, etc. His style is at once deeply technical, classical, and avant-garde.
Today, we chat about his prolific career, the creations he considers part of his personal canon, his unfiltered thoughts on the current state of niche, and Christopher shares the never-before-heard stories behind some of his greatest works.
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FRAGS MENTIONED:
Spoturno 1921 (SOTD), Shalimar L’Essence (SOTD), Molton Brown Milk Musk, Frederic Malle Musc Ravageur, Serge Lutens: Santal Majuscule, Féminité du Bois, Rahät Loukoum, L'Orpheline, L'Innommable, Serge Noir, Chanel No. 5, Spoturno: 1921, Barbicaja, Alphée, L'Âme du Phénix; Giardini di Toscano Bianco Latte, Serge Lutens: Un Bois Vanille, YSL Opium, Dior Poison, Pour un homme de Caron, Serge Lutens: L’Orpheline, Féminité du Bois, Ambre Sultan, Chergui; Spoturno Barbicaja; Serge Lutens: Santal de Mysore, Santal Blanc; Le Labo Santal 33; Serge Lutens: Fumerie Turque, A la Nuit, Cuir Mauresque
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the perfume room. My scent of the day today is Spaterno 1921. And I thought it would be |
| 0:16.5 | interesting to do a side-by-side comparison of 1921 versus Chalimar the Sons, given that they are too |
| 0:24.2 | very buzzed about recent launches, both timeless modern perfumes, reimagined for today, but |
| 0:29.8 | inspired by perfumes of the past. And I can't talk about them without acknowledging this delightful |
| 0:36.5 | recent resurgence of the vintage |
| 0:39.3 | ambery scent profile. Rettolent of scents either specifically or loosely like Emmerhod or |
| 0:46.1 | Shalimar. We are in this interesting time right now when enough time might have lapsed for |
| 0:52.2 | people to discover these scent profiles free from any personal associations. |
| 0:57.6 | And I've said it before, and I'll say it again, when people accuse certain scents of smelling like, quote unquote, old lady, on a surface level, it's not that dissimilar than when someone says a perfume is four men or for women. These are learned |
| 1:13.4 | consumer codes. If every man that you grew up with smelled a certain way or if every woman did |
| 1:18.7 | and one step further, if every older woman did, it's understandable that these associations |
| 1:24.8 | would be baked into these smells. Now, we could unpack things even further |
| 1:30.4 | and really get into the discourse of why the old lady aroma most specifically has been used so pejoratively, |
| 1:36.5 | but that's a conversation for another time. The point I am trying to make is that in order for |
| 1:41.2 | consumers to unlearn these associations, we simply have to break the mold. |
| 1:46.5 | The rise in unisex and gender fluid, genderful, genderless, |
| 1:50.8 | whatever label and approach that brands have taken |
| 1:53.5 | has been particularly popular in the last decade. |
| 1:57.3 | And as such, so many of today's consumers, |
| 2:00.3 | especially ones just getting into perfume, |
| 2:02.6 | have already unlearned or never learned these associations. |
| 2:07.0 | So going back to scents like Chalimar, Chanel number five, Mitsuko, more recent sense, |
... |
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