This Hawaii-Inspired Scent Is Summer in a Bottle

From a single-room studio in Newport Beach, California, stocked with amber glass bottles of plant extracts, Melissa Flagg has spent the past decade carefully hand-blending a cult series of small-batch scents with notes like sweet orange blossom and honeysuckle oil, a powdery violet accord. Her latest line playfully riffs on the Hawaiian archipelago that the self-taught perfumer visited as a child—the thatched-roof huts of Oahu, Maui’s Wai’anapanapa black-sand beach—and may in fact be the olfactory definition of island living.

“I fell in love with the lush flowers and the tropical fruits, and spent hours dreaming of going back,” says Flagg, who cut her teeth at Chanel Parfums before launching her first perfume at Fred Segal back in 2006. Hoping to capture her childhood nostalgia with an authentic Hawaiian fragrance, she started by pulling indigenous flora: local pears and gardenias, ripened pineapples, and melia plumeria petals plucked from a lei. Each of the five botanical scents is custom-made to order and hand-poured by Flagg into glass flacons, capped with Old Hollywood–style atomizers and papered with an ink sketch of a palm tree, or Ohai Alii bloom. “My goal was to capture the true essence of Hawaii in a bottle,” Flagg says. Turns out she caught summer, too.

Melissa Flagg Hawaiian Botanicals Perfume Spray, $46 each, anthropologie.com

 

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