You've Never Smelled Anything Like Gamine Before

If you feel like everyone and anyone is releasing fragrances these days, you're not alone. But this is what I'll say: it's not often that a new fragrance brand is backed by decades of familial history. That’s what immediately drew me to Gamine, founded by experienced beauty executive and creative Melanie Dir. Dir is the daughter of master perfumer Claude Dir, who has created scents for the likes of Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs, so it's safe to say that fragrance is in her blood. From infancy, she was exposed to resins, musks, woods, and accords, developing a nasal palate that so many of us don't even have in adulthood. Then, at the age of six, her father began formally training her in raw materials and composition.

So, it was only a matter of time before Dir took everything that she learned throughout her childhood and all that her father instilled in her and built her very own fragrance brand. While the brand emerges from her family tradition, she is also paving her own way. "With GAMINE, I constructed a new system built on three codes: global, grit and luxury," she says. The packaging is designed in Brooklyn which represents Dir's present; batched in Grasse, a small French village near Cannes, which represents her familial past; and composed in Milan, which represents her life-long affinity for consistently traveling and not staying in one place for too long.

The formulas consist of concentrated natural essential oils, resulting in scents incomparable to other fragrances. At a deskside in Coveteur's office, I immediately noticed that her rose fragrance, 1000g, smells nothing like any other rose fragrance I've ever smelled. That's because it's natural, grounded in the earth, and balanced with notes of Nepal pepper, blue chamomile, oakmoss, and more.

Dir describes one of her other offerings, Heroic Dose, as an "aromatic trip" that's both clean and dirty at the same time. It's sharp, but also smoky, cerebral yet bodily, and features balanced notes of blue hemp, salty marine air, chocolat noir, saffron, French hay, bourbon, cumin, and patchouli for a blend unlike anything that anyone else has ever thought of—but that works perfectly. I would describe this fragrance as round and inherently masculine, but not necessarily in a gendered way—more so in that it felt assertive and strong.

The third offering from this launch is Altered States, which aims to "ground the body in immersive frequency" through notes of nutmeg, cardamom, plum, black truffle, sandalwood, guaiac wood, and more. Despite self-describing myself as a floral fragrance girl, this is the one that I immediately knew was my favorite. It smelled earthy, natural, and warm, and brought me back to sunny spring days spent outside during my college days in the Hudson Valley—it felt nostalgic even though I didn't create and bottle the fragrance myself.

Each scent is available in the form of a traditional spray perfume—called Bricks because of the weighted glass packaging and industrial eco rub top, resulting in a hefty bottle reminiscent of a brick—and a smaller solid perfume, in the form of a little ball you can easily toss into your bag and take everywhere for inevitably necessary touchups. Plus, in line with the bag charm trend, GAMINE offers hardware in the form of a cube that the solid perfumes easily fit into (and be shown off in).

With so much history to back up Dir and her inaugural solo perfume drop, team Coveteur can confidently predict that GAMINE will quickly become the next cult favorite fragrance brand—mark our words.