Signature Scents: The Best Perfume Brands Born in Melbourne

Perfume is memory, mood and mischief in a glass vial — a whole city distilled to a note that trails behind you at dusk. In Melbourne, the hunt begins at small, scent-savvy boutiques where blotters fan like library cards and patient experts guide you through iris and incense, citrus and smoke. This is slow choosing: on skin, not paper; over hours, not minutes. Consider season and setting, day and after-dark; notice how a quiet floral warms to amber, how a green herb turns velvety on the tram home. Bring water, take pauses, test no more than three at a time. When the alchemy clicks, you’ll know — not because someone tells you, but because the air around you suddenly feels like yours.

Here’s where to start, and how to find the one that stays.

Flaner

Flâner Fragrances doesn’t so much bottle perfume as it does distil Melbourne itself — the after-rain shimmer on Gertrude Street, the clang of a tram swallowed by night air, the hush of a laneway gallery. Founded by Andrew Hardeman and Mary Fox, the brand revels in what they call “urban perfumery”: vegan, cruelty-free, defiantly genderless, crafted slow and local. Their Fitzroy store, once a barber shop, now hums with minimalist geometry and gallery-lit calm.

Sitchu Tip: Try Sonic Silver: cool metal softened by skin and city heat, as modern as Melbourne itself.

191 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy 

Ficifolia

Ficifolia is Melbourne bottled in parfum form — bold, intimate, impossibly chic. Founded in 2020 by Sophie Marcoux, the house trades in high-strength Extrait de Parfum (25%), each one a love letter to the city’s rituals: tram hum, laneway blooms, velvet-dark theatre nights. Scents like Rose Street and Intermission are crafted vegan and cruelty-free, designed to slip from daylight to after hours with effortless style. The “Flight Deck” discovery kit? Your boarding pass to a signature that feels wholly, seductively your own — and now, there’s a Sydney series too.

Tsu Lange Yor

Tsu Lange Yor translates to “long life,” but Troye Sivan’s Melbourne-born fragrance house is really about living beautifully in the now. Dreamed up in Carlton with his brother Steele, it’s equal parts music, memory and mischief, blending perfumery with design objects that look as good as they smell. The debut Eau de Parfum, TLY 5755, is a smoky-amber ode to velvet lounges and late-night conversations, while candles double as sculptural keepsakes. It’s pop-star pedigree with Melbourne soul — and undeniably, the city’s chicest new scent language.

Sitchu Tip: Our top picks are Pool — a sparkling dive into summer with citrus brightness, crisp greens and that salty-ozone shimmer that feels like water on skin — and the new Sage’s Rose, created for Troye Sivan’s sister, which takes the classic bloom and twists it modern with dew-fresh petals, soft musk and a smoky undertone.

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Váhy

Váhy is Melbourne’s answer to the old perfume guard — natural, elegant, and quietly rebellious. Founded by lifelong friends Anna Weatherlake and Kate Macdonald, this house insists on purity without sacrificing glamour: every bottle is 100% natural, vegan, cruelty-free, and poured into black French glass to guard its precious oils. Scents such as Isle of Blanc (all summer light), Ember Haze (smoky sophistication), and Midnight Ruze (a dusky rose with edge) reveal their complexity on skin, not paper. Transparency meets artistry — balance, bottled with unmistakable Melbourne style.

Aesop

Aesop is Melbourne’s most elegant export — a brand that began in Armadale in 1987 and grew into a global design darling without ever losing its roots. Headquartered in Collingwood, its philosophy is quiet luxury: plant-based meets lab-made, each ingredient chosen for both performance and poetry. The perfumes read like essays in atmosphere — Marrakech Intense all spice and heat, Hwyl a meditative walk through ancient forest, Eidesis dark resins and pepper. Even their newest launch, Above Us, Steorra, feels celestial. More than fragrance, Aesop is architecture for the senses.

Multiple store locations across the city

Perdrisat

Perdrisât is perfume for those who like their scents with a backstory and a wry smile. Dreamed up in Melbourne by Callum Rory Mitchell as a tribute to his grandmother, every bottle feels like a film still in fragrance form — witty, intimate, a touch subversive. Last Word crashes in with cucumber and mint before slipping into incense and vetiver, while Pretty Boy and Love Bomb play with gender and drama like perfume as performance art. Vegan, small-batch and cruelty-free, Perdrisât proves that Melbourne does narrative just as well through nose as it does on screen.

Mihan Aromatics

Mihan Aromatics doesn’t dabble in perfume — it stages little dramas in glass. Founded by Julia Brown and Josh Mihan, this Melbourne house spins stories out of organic sugarcane spirit, native botanicals and a knack for emotion as architecture. Their bottles are hand-filled, but the ideas are vast: Guilty Story wears like velvet after dark, while Petrichor Plains captures the storm-charged hush of countryside rain. Vegan, cruelty-free and stubbornly local, Mihan is less about accessorising and more about bottling the weather system of your mood.

203 Chapel Street, Prahran

Essensorie

Essensorie is Melbourne at its most quietly beguiling. Perched in the Block Arcade, it forgoes the smoke and mirrors of synthetics for perfumes spun from pure botanicals. You’ll smell it before you see it: rose that actually smells like rose, cedarwood with backbone, citrus that zings like a summer peel. It’s perfume done the old-fashioned way but with a hint of modern restraint, and a store where shopping feels less like retail therapy and more like slipping into a pocket of nature, mid-city.

Shop 3, The Block Arcade, 282 Collins Street, Melbourne 

Melbourne’s fragrance makers prove the city has its own nose for style — inventive, grounded, and impossible to mistake for anywhere else. If your appetite for discovery’s just been whetted, keep wandering with our guides to the best boutiques in Melbourne and Melbourne-born fashion labels.

Writer

Kelsey Harrington

29 September 2025

Kelsey Harrington is a Melbourne-based writer with a sharp eye for the city's ever-evolving food, wine, arts, and culture scene. Her journey into the creative industry took the scenic route—what started as a passion for capturing Melbourne’s energy through a camera lens led her to Sitchu, where she worked her way up to Melbourne Editor. With over four years in the industry, she’s all about uncovering the best places to eat, drink, and explore. Off the clock? You’ll find her diving into a platter of fresh oysters and crudo, gallery-hopping, or sipping an extra dirty martini while plotting her next adventure.