It’s happened to all of us: you’re out and about and suddenly you catch a whiff of something that brings a memory flooding back and the emotions connected to it. Not only does scent travel from our noses to the olfactory bulb in our forebrains that is directly connected to memory and emotion, but scent can trigger vivid memories more often than any of our other senses.
Perfumer Marty Schissler understands this connection intimately, and along with designer and husband Alvaro Lozano, created the new brand Domestica Perfume. Domestica debuted in December 2025 with three deeply transformative fragrances and has expanded from online sales to include availability at two brick and mortar stores in Chicago. Marty and Alvaro describe what Domestica does as “treating a bottle of perfume as a vessel that lets us take home with us wherever we go.”
In this interview with News is Out, Marty and Alvaro spoke about memory, scent and the everyday inspirations behind their fragrances. This interview was conducted via email.
Marty, as a self-taught perfumer, how did you learn the craft and begin developing formulas?
Perfume has been deeply special to me for several years now. For much of my life, I just wore whatever fragrances smelled nice. Circa 2018, my best friend introduced me to Etat Libre d’Orange, a niche perfume brand with more out-there scents. I was so intrigued by their perfumes Jasmin et Cigarette and Putain des Palaces in particular. To me, these perfumes went beyond just smelling nice and actually became something emotionally evocative. These perfumes opened my eyes (and nose) to the niche and, more importantly, independent perfume world and I am forever grateful to those scents. In 2024, I thought it would be a good idea to start learning what went into some of my favorite fragrances and I got a starter kit from Perfumer’s Apprentice.
After quitting a deeply boring marketing job in mid-2025, I began to create perfume on a nearly full-time basis, spending long hours lurking on r/DIYFragrance and the Basenotes forum. I quickly learned that there are a lot of loud, pretentious voices on perfume forums and so much of the information they provide is gatekeep-y, exclusionary, or just outright incorrect. After cutting through all the noise, I found my way to Hoshi Gato’s beautiful (free!) sacred text, “Introduction to Perfumery”—a document to which I am eternally indebted. With this guide and my starter perfume kit in hand, I slowly gathered more knowledge and ingredients until I felt comfortable enough creating full compositions. While there are some rules in perfumery—largely focused on ensuring the product is skin safe—there are virtually no limits to what you can create, which sometimes makes it hard to know when a perfume is “done.” I learn something new with each draft (and fully-fledged perfume) that I create. I think perfumery is a really beautiful, humbling art form that rewards endless curiosity and an appreciation for the unexpected.
Alvaro, what role does visual design play in shaping the identity of a fragrance before someone even smells it?
So many perfumes are escapist, trying to take you to a fantasy of a place or a fantasy version of yourself. Domestica is all about feeling, playing at the edges of memory and confabulation (hence the name of our first collection), taking you back somewhere you have already been to find comfort in the mundane. I wanted to make people wonder if what they are feeling is truly a memory—of a sick day spent at home, drinking straight from the hose in your childhood backyard, or being a reckless baby spilling your fruity cereal milk all over your #2 pencils—or if it is just something you so desperately want to be real.
The visual world of Domestica is the entry point into the scents. How do I create a world that translates the way the scents pull you into the depths of your imagination? Heck, how do I even answer this question if that is the case (LOL)? When creating the visual world of Domestica, I wanted to intentionally build the world with fuzzy edges, meeting at the intersection of the real and the imaginary.
Right now, confabulation is often tied to AI and its hallucinations, but we found the human concept of honestly lying to yourself an interesting source of inspiration for both the scents and the visuals. We want Domestica to reflect that honest humanness, so we don’t use AI at any stage of our creative or business process. We want to take that unfocused, human flaw and make it the cornerstone of the visual world that Domestica lives in. I wanted the brand to feel playful and have the freedom to evolve over time. So many brands feel untouchable and pristine, but I wanted to create something silly and fun, something you wanted to play with and hold up to the light. Something that feels lighter and somehow possible.
Do you begin with a memory, a set of notes, or a mood when developing a new scent?
For me, it’s quite rare to start with a set of notes. I like to start with a clear concept, pull all the perfume materials that I think might be a good fit for the concept, create a written draft, and then get to mixing. Because materials often interact in unexpected ways and reveal facets that I could never predict when drafting a formula on paper, the notes are often the last thing to come together. I’ve also found that a perfume’s working title will influence the direction of the perfume itself.
Home with You was the name I originally had in mind for the brand and this name served as inspiration for the eventual scent it created. Yard was just a placeholder name for the green, vegetal petrichor scent I was trying to make, and we ultimately decided to keep that placeholder name because it was simple, effective, and kind of funny to say out loud. The only case thus far where I began a perfume with a fully developed accord (a group of ingredients that smells like something specific) was Reckless Baby. I wanted to see if I could create a photo-realistic fruity cereal milk accord. I was happy with what I made, but when I showed it to my friend, we both agreed we wanted something more from it. While we were talking about possible directions for the fully-formed perfume, she threw out the name “Reckless Baby” and I knew I needed to follow through on what that name evoked. I added some bolder, more unexpected materials—pink pepper, vetiver, something that smells like synthetic pear—and ended up with something that reflects its absurd name. It’s playful and strange, and smells both childish and grown-up. It’s three toddlers in a trenchcoat pretending to be an adult.
Domestica is formulated and packaged in Chicago. Does the city influence the work or the kinds of stories you want to tell with scent?
So far, Chicago hasn’t directly inspired the perfumes themselves. That said, we’ve produced much of our photography and videography in and around our Andersonville apartment, so the visual world is very much grounded in our everyday life in Chicago. For example, the outdoor shots of our perfumes that you see on our website were taken on a walk around our neighborhood.
Since our perfumes focus on the beauty of the mundane, we wanted Domestica’s visual world to reflect that. We used props like a little sidewalk library or a swing to situate our perfumes in playful, everyday settings. We took a mirror from our apartment to the park next door and placed it on a picnic table to shoot photos where the perfumes are mirrored against a blue sky. In this way, our immediate surroundings in the city have influenced our work.
What do you hope someone feels the first time they smell a Domestica perfume?
Like any perfumery, we hope that people find something unexpected and novel in our perfumes, like a memory they haven’t revisited in a while or a scent profile that they didn’t expect to enjoy. We love it when our concepts translate directly through the perfumes, but it’s even more fun when someone identifies notes–and better yet, specific scenes of their own–in a perfume that we might not have detected ourselves. Someone on Reddit mentioned that Yard reminded them of drinking straight from the garden hose as a kid. People can have wildly different impressions of the same set of notes or materials and it’s fun to hear about the unexpected memories and impressions that arise from the perfumes we’ve created.
Of the three initial scents, which one took the most experimentation to get right?
Home with You was the first scent I began developing for Domestica and it took by far the longest to finish. For Home with You, I envisioned a perfume that emulates a sick day spent resting at home with someone you love. I wanted the impression to be initially medicinal (mentholated cherry cough drop, Band-aid accord) and then fade into something cozy and comforting, like when you’re on the back end of a cold and you’re starting to feel better. It was quite hard to balance these two ends of the scent spectrum. This was the first time I had tried to create something that I intended to share with the world, so I think that also made the development process that much harder. Home with You also has some of the harsher notes of our three debut perfumes, and it took dozens of trials to smooth out the more aggressive parts of the perfume and nudge the formulation in an enjoyable, cozy direction. To me, there’s a fine line between simply accurately rendering a concept in a perfume and creating something that’s artful.
Scent is strongly tied to memory, but memory can be unreliable. Do you think perfume works best when it evokes something specific, or when it leaves room for interpretation?
Despite our brand relying heavily on specific motifs for each scent, the most fun part is hearing other people’s interpretations of the scents. Our debut collection, called Confabulation, is named after a memory error in which the brain compensates for memory loss by fabricating memories to fill in the blanks. We like to think of perfumes as confabulation itself. Perfume, at its best, should both resurface memories and playfully fill gaps in memory with things we may not have actually experienced. It’s not important that a scent memory is 100% accurate. We believe that perfume works best when it has a strong perspective that is emotionally evocative.
Where can folks find your scents in Chicago and beyond?
In Chicago, you can find us at The Center of Order and Experimentation and Everything Store. In addition to our standard 30ml bottles, Everything Store also stocks 2.7ml decants of each perfume. Otherwise, we currently ship to the USA from our online store, domesticaperfume.com.