Our Story
We love bringing joy to people who delight in scent, making perfumes that help people creatively express unique facets of their humanness, and connecting to the elemental sacredness of perfume as ceremony. Alkemia’s artisan perfumes are hand-blended in small batches using natural essences, ethically rendered accords, lab-created aroma molecules and a little science, passion, and magic. Our perfumes are free of phthalates, DPG, and parabens and designed to morph with your chemistry to create a sensual alchemy of scent and skin that is special to you.
Alkemia was started in 2009 by Sharra, a migraine-prone perfumista who loved perfume but couldn’t find unique, affordable, ethical, non-headache-producing scents that truly reflected her quirky, neurospicy spirit. Combining decades of studies in herbalism, ethnobotanical history, folklore, and alchemical perfumery with the chemistry of modern perfuming, the first Alkemia perfumes were good, but they were missing that special something now associated with Alkemia perfumes. The science needed to be ignited by passion and magic. We found passion in the exquisite beauty of art and poetry and their time-traveling powers to reach through centuries and inspire a complex array of emotions. We found magic by blending perfumes in harmony and alongside the natural cycles and divine rhythms of sky, earth, sun, and moon. The perfumes that came from bringing together mind, heart, and spirit were different. They seemed to communicate something special to people who were seeking to have a more meaningful relationship with their perfume, the world and themselves.
Our customers often are people who have a hard time relating to the mass conformity that large commercial perfumers seem to think they should have. People who understood that being human is about being wonderfully, unabashedly different - gutsy, fierce, strong, seductive, compelling, quirky, brainy, gorgeous, and inspiring a slightly numinous awe no matter if we're wearing drywall dust or fine French silk. People have used our perfumes to mark some of their most important events - couples wearing our perfumes on their wedding day, students using scent to optimize memory recall for critical exams, travelers using scent to imprint a specific memory of place and time, actors and writers using perfume as they bring characters to life. We have been deeply moved to learn that people have even buried their beloveds with our perfumes. In the course of our perfuming journey we’ve also discovered that perfumes can even bring a certain type of healing. People have written to describe our perfumes as companions through chronic pain management, post-traumatic stress, hospitalization, grief, and isolation. In the words of one customer: "When everything feels hopeless and I can't even get out of bed, your perfumes remind me of beauty in the world. They are such a comfort.”
Today Alkemia has grown to comprise a small, diverse community of family and friends (two and four-legged). We are artists, writers, book nerds, farmers, dancers, actors, poets, teachers, musicians, science geeks, naturalists, refugees from academia, and connoisseurs of life. Our humble goal is simply to make perfumes that bring a little joy, delight in humanness, and a reminder of beauty into a world too often lacking these things.
Art: A Rose and a Glass by Hermann van der Mijn, 1738