meet lula curioca, a mexico city-based olfactory artist and perfumer who transcends traditional approaches to scent creation. since founding her eponymous studio in 2018, she has pioneered a unique approach to perfumery that celebrates the relationship between body and environment. drawing from her background in textile and fashion design, lula transforms humanistic concepts into sensory experiences, creating fragrances that act as extensions of human identity.
How did your journey as a perfumer begin, and what has shaped it along the way?
It started as a deep desire to communicate emotions, concepts, and moments. I never actually dreamt of becoming a perfumer—only to be able to create art which would go to the root of the feeling and that would shake you in the most primal way. Very early in my adult life (at 18 years old) I found out that scent is what provoked that for me, so I started playing around with fragrance and incorporating it into my practice. Later in life, I decided to professionalize it, studying and practicing perfumery as my main tool of expression.
What emotions or memories do you hope to capture in your creations?
Some are specific moments that I have lived, and behind those I find something relevant to share with people. Others are more abstract emotions or concepts, for which there is no specific counterpoint in the outer world, but for which there may be in the inner world. It’s for those cases that the actual quality of the scent matters: Its texture, its weight, its volume.he most physical and ethereal sensations come into play here and I have to let my full body guide me to transmit those sensations in a scent.
As an artist who works primarily with scent, what is your relationship to our other senses?
I’m very much in touch with my other senses. I love touch. It’s funny because my favorite senses are the “lowest”ones in the traditional hierarchy of the senses. I feel you can’t neglect any sense. It’s important for me to be open to all the information that surrounds me, in any form in which it’s presented, and to somehow be a vessel to receive it, to process it, and give it back to the world passed through my own body and perception. Besides being a perfumer, I’m also a designer, so I love designing every single aspect of my work. It’s just another way to keep the communication going.
How do the landscapes, textures, and cultures that surround you find their way into your practice?
I feel like a sponge that eventually releases all the life I have experienced, but only after a deep process of absorption. So, with that said, I feel that sometimes I’m not even aware of all that I have been through until it just comes out from me in some form.
What is the story your perfume Brindis Eterno?
Uf, Brindis Eterno is a state. It’s a wonderful state in which I would love to be all the time. It’s that moment in which you just feel so, so, so comfortable in your flesh, calm inside, wonderful outside, having magical and fluid conversations, feeling this grounded and shining light inside you–true confidence. To me it is that perfect balance between yourself and the outer world. Those moments with the right people in which you enter this sort of loophole where time doesn’t exist (because it actually doesn’t!), and you are suddenly a living proof of that: that time, in the right state and with the right people, is relative and feels like a celebration of life that just never ends.
discover the perfume in our discovery set:
As an artist who works primarily with scent, what is your relationship to our other senses?
I’m very much in touch with my other senses. I love touch. It’s funny because my favorite senses are the “lowest”ones in the traditional hierarchy of the senses. I feel you can’t neglect any sense. It’s important for me to be open to all the information that surrounds me, in any form in which it’s presented, and to somehow be a vessel to receive it, to process it, and give it back to the world passed through my own body and perception. Besides being a perfumer, I’m also a designer, so I love designing every single aspect of my work. It’s just another way to keep the communication going.
How do the landscapes, textures, and cultures that surround you find their way into your practice?
I feel like a sponge that eventually releases all the life I have experienced, but only after a deep process of absorption. So, with that said, I feel that sometimes I’m not even aware of all that I have been through until it just comes out from me in some form.
What is the story your perfume Brindis Eterno?
Uf, Brindis Eterno is a state. It’s a wonderful state in which I would love to be all the time. It’s that moment in which you just feel so, so, so comfortable in your flesh, calm inside, wonderful outside, having magical and fluid conversations, feeling this grounded and shining light inside you–true confidence. To me it is that perfect balance between yourself and the outer world. Those moments with the right people in which you enter this sort of loophole where time doesn’t exist (because it actually doesn’t!), and you are suddenly a living proof of that: that time, in the right state and with the right people, is relative and feels like a celebration of life that just never ends.
