The Birth of Onycha’s First Leather Family

A funny thing happened recently.

Someone walked up to the booth at the Chattanooga Ren Faire and asked whether Onycha had any leather fragrances. Later, a similar question came through TikTok.

And I realized I didn't actually have a good answer.

Why don't we have a Leather family?

Now, leather isn't entirely new territory for Onycha. I've used leather materials before, and some of my fragrances contain leather facets as part of a larger composition. What I've never done is build a true Leather family.… and that’s my favorite way of working. Family, followed by fragrance(s). A family is essentially a framework that determines what kinds of fragrances can exist within it, what tension mechanisms are available, how different materials interact, and how many distinct configurations can be created without losing the family's identity… Once the family is stable, individual fragrances begin to emerge from it.  …Long story short, I've been working on a Leather family and it’s going great!

One thing I knew very early on was that I wanted to use Onycha’s Twin Pearl Vault. This is a tension mechanism I've worked with before… very adjustable and tends to create a sweet tension energy. But while I was mapping out the Leather family, I stumbled across another area of the synergy landscape that looked useful. It took some untangling, but eventually it became an entirely new mechanism that I'm calling the Hide Vault.

The Twin Pearl Vault creates sweet tension, the Hide Vault creates bitter tension. My current thinking is that the family should contain both.

The sweet Tobacco-ish tension vault would play against the bitter Hide Vault, and together they would create the signature glow that makes the new Leather family feel like itself.

The first fragrance in the family will be a Sandalwood and Mushroom Leather.

The structure is still evolving, but the basic idea came together pretty quickly. Tobacco and Indole will form the sweet tension vault. Then Angelica, Oakmoss… a touch of smoky Cade, Labdanum, and several leather materials will form the structure around it.

To create a convincing leather effect, and especially to create multiple convincing leather effects, I've had to use more synthetics than I'm normally accustomed to using. There are certain leather facets that are difficult to reach otherwise. Materials like 6-Methyl Quinoline, Cuir de Russie, Castoreum Givco, Veramoss and Iso E Super become very useful in this sort of work.

The exciting thing is that I already have a lot of possible leather fragrances in my head.

Dark leather.

White leather.

Even icy leather...

Eucalyptus, cold air, leather.

There are far more possibilities here than I originally expected! The Sandalwood-Mushroom Leather is the one that has my attention right now, though. It has extremely high synergy connectivity and two opposing sources of tension. Usually when I see that combination, I pay attention. The materials seem eager to connect to one another. The whole structure feels unusually alive!

When I think about it visually, I see deep oxblood tones, mahogany, brown, almost black at the edges. I think this is going to be a really good fragrance!

What's interesting is that while building this family I discovered something completely unexpected.

It's strangely musk-phobic. Most musks completely destroy the effect I'm looking for. They break the tension mechanisms holding the fragrance together and collapse the structure I'm trying to create. The beautiful opposition between the sweet and bitter systems starts to disappear and the fragrance loses some of what makes it interesting.

I've tested quite a few musks at this point and the only one I've found that consistently behaves itself is L-Muscone.

L-Muscone is an artificial deer musk. It’s warm, slightly animalic, an excellent fixative, and somehow manages to amplify everything around it without disturbing the architecture of the fragrance. The other musks seem to penetrate the vault itself and interfere with the tension mechanisms.

Every fragrance family I build has a list of materials that aren’t allowed inside it. That might sound limiting, but restrictions often create character. The more I work as a perfumer, the more I find myself designing systems rather than individual fragrances… Each family develops its own rules. Certain materials become essential, others become forbidden. The result is that each family starts to develop its own unique personality.

As the Sandalwood-Mushroom Leather became more stable, I started thinking about a second fragrance...

A sort of inversion of the first. At one point I drew up a rough SAS ( Synthetic Accord Stack) profile and realized I had several drastically different identities available. An iris-suede, a cold powder leather.. a skin-lit white petal leather. I asked one of my friends which direction she thought I should pursue. She chose White Petal. I think she was right.

The Sandalwood-Mushroom fragrance feels deep, dark and masculine. The White Petal Leather is softer, more sensual, but still in the unisex realm. Think white florals, powder, soft skin, leather…

Now I just need a good name for it (any ideas?)…

While all this was happening, I also finally finished mixing my Saffron Rosaic fragrance.

I genuinely think it might be the prettiest thing I’ve ever made.

The Rosaic family began with a very specific goal. I wanted a hyper-realistic Rose family. Not simply a rose accord, but a family capable of recreating the experience of a living rose: the flower, the leaves, the stem, the dew, the atmosphere around the plant… The idea was to create a family that would allow me to place a Hero inside that realistic rose effect. The Hero could change, while the rose remained convincingly itself.

As I continued building the family, it became much larger than I expected. The Rosaic family currently contains more than 1.3 million possible configurations. Part of what makes it work is a patchouli that I selected specifically because it creates excellent wiring for tension. It acts almost like a Rose Pseudo-Chypre without actually using Chypre materials.

There’s also a petrichor-style tension mechanism built around mitti in the base. That wet stone after rain effect bounces against the realistic rose structure and helps create some of the beauty of the family.

The Saffron Rosaic configuration seemed inevitable from the moment I designed it.

Saffron as the Hero, supported by Black Pepper and Yellow Mandarin. It’s refined, sexy… a spicy hyper-realistic rose. Everything just seemed to snap into place as though it was destined to exist.

And now another Rosaic fragrance is beginning to take shape: a darker rose. This one emerged from a conversation with another Onycha friend, who described wanting a Gothic rose that remained photorealistic, with only a small functional amount of resin, a touch of incense, no screechiness, and no excessive jamminess.

I won’t reveal too much because it’s still a collaboration in progress...

But while working on it, I may have discovered an entirely new tension mechanism involving carnation. Which is exactly the sort of thing that tends to happen when building new fragrances. You start searching for one thing and accidentally discover something else.

Speaking of discoveries...

I’ve also been working on Vetiver MerAmber.

Actually, I now have two Amber families: Ocean Amber and Werewolf Amber.

Ocean Amber has been giving me trouble.

The family itself is built around my homemade amber structure, with a green stemmy introduction, a floral seam in the heart, a saltwater cypress base, and a seaweed tension vault that turned out remarkably well. In my head, the family evokes an ancient spice-trade ship crossing the Mediterranean. Amber resin, herbs in stoppered jars, rosewood furniture below deck, salt clinging to everything, sea air moving through the ship.

Romantic… but the fragrance itself wasn’t behaving, something felt wrong. Then the final material arrived: Lavender Aldehyde.

I added it to the blend and the entire fragrance transformed instantly. The puzzle piece clicked into place. Suddenly the vetiver became recognizably itself, the amber opened up. The whole thing felt simultaneously classical and modern, like something that could have existed 150 years ago while also feeling completely contemporary.

Moments like that are one of the reasons I love perfumery so much. You spend months building structures, mapping families, testing materials, adjusting vaults and tension mechanisms. Then one tiny material arrives in the mail and changes everything…

Joseph Erwin Perfumer & Owner, Onycha Fragrance Co.

PS: Go follow us on Instagram, TikTok and Substack for quick (or longer) updates and check out our current rose scents: Burgund and Zahraei, available in 10, 30, 50 and 100ml bottles (there’s rose in PowderBerry, our bestseller, as well, but it’s not the main focus of the scent).