Zarina MaizelZarina MaizelDryness, mineral, silence.
Honey slowly darkened over embers — warm, resinous, with a low animalic hum.
Dark honey and immortelle, warm and almost edible, deepening into labdanum, tonka and sandalwood. A resinous, faintly animalic amber that lingers for hours — slow, golden, enveloping. An evening scent.
Japanese citrus at dawn.
Yuzu — tart, green, alive — unfolds over warm wood and musk. Not a dessert, not a fleeting freshness: cold light that lasts the whole day.
Dawn as a flower.
Boronia and jasmine over a sandalwood body — powdery, warm, faintly fruity. Light that has skin. One of the cleanest scents in the collection.
Half-light.
Dark iris submerged in cocoa, leather and oud. The dry bitterness of fig leaf, a spark of blackcurrant, the smoke of saffron. A scent that lives in shadow.
Mist.
Pale iris wrapped in spice and sandalwood. Cardamom and pink pepper in the opening, a powdery heart, a warm woody floor. An enveloping fog rather than a dense perfume.
Undergrowth.
A classic iris chypre: oakmoss, vetiver and patchouli beneath the powder of iris. Earth, damp wood, the green bitterness of galbanum. A walk through an autumn forest.
Tea ceremony.
Boronia and green tea over Japanese woods — hinoki, Siam wood. Translucent, meditative, dry. Silence in the shape of a scent.
Water lily.
A summer aqua-woody: yuzu, grapefruit, litsea over hinoki and musk. Freshness with a green coolness and a drop of melon. Lightness that has roots.
Wet stone.
A mineral scent: yuzu and juniper over damp hyacinth, iris and vetiver. A grey powdery body, dry earth, the coniferous cool of cypress. Stone after the rain.
August hay.
A pastoral scent of cut grass: hay absolute, chamomile, wormwood over tonka and sandalwood. Warm, dry, nostalgic. A field at summer's end.
Second skin.
Musk minimalism: iris, rose and linaloe over the warm skin of musks. An almost invisible, intimate scent — the kind mistaken for the smell of one's own skin.
Velvet phantom.
A musk scent with a floral heart: jasmine and neroli enveloped in warm musks and tonka. Soft, powdery, enveloping, like velvet against skin.
Black juniper.
A dark woody-resinous: juniper and black pepper over cedar, palo santo, elemi. Coniferous audacity, smoke, a drop of oud. Masculine, dry, sombre.
Wild honey wood.
Waxen honey and osmanthus over cedar and vetiver. A citrus opening, a warm beeswax heart, dry wood. Honey without sweetness — like the comb, not the dessert.
Bronze leather.
A spiced leather: black pepper and ginger over a leather accord, rose and saffron. Bitter marigold in the opening. Warm, audacious, noble leather with an oriental spice.
Floral leather.
Jasmine and ylang over soft leather. Hyacinth in the opening, saffron in the heart, cypriol wood in the base. A feminine leather — not rough, but wrapped in white flowers.
Shadow of dawn.
Rose and oud: a generous bergamot, jasmine and rose over oud wood. Dark wood beneath pale flowers. The contrast of dawn and shadow in a single bottle.
Relic.
Frankincense, myrrh, resins. The sacred smoke of frankincense over labdanum, palo santo, benzoin and styrax. An ancient, meditative, temple scent. A prayer in the form of a smell.
Venomous.
Tuberose in all its dangerous beauty: a white flower with indolic depth, jasmine, ylang, osmanthus. Saffron spice, warm wood. Seductive, audacious, not for the timid.
Blackcurrant dream.
Tuberose and blackcurrant: a lush white flower over berry tartness. Blackcurrant bud in the opening, creamy tuberose in the heart, a musky floor. A fruity-floral reverie.
Heather.
A dry fougère: lavender and juniper over oakmoss, vetiver and patchouli. Herbal freshness, green bitterness, an earthy floor. A moor overgrown with heather — austere and clean.
Green fig.
Fig leaf in all its dryness: the crushed stem, chlorophyll, green bitterness. No sweetness, no dessert — a vegetal, dry, living fig. A Mediterranean noon.
Fig and jasmine.
Creamy fig embraces jasmine sambac: the milky flesh of fig and a white flower entwined. Warm, elegant, enveloping. Fig as a setting for jasmine.
Beside you — not around you
Some fragrances enter a room before the person does. Others stay behind, once the room is empty. I make the second kind.
I’m drawn to density that doesn’t press. Freshness that doesn’t shout. A flower that never becomes a bouquet. Wood that sounds like silence, not like furniture.
My formulas hold a great deal of green, iris, mineral, hinoki, fig, dry wood and air — and almost nothing of what makes modern niche so recognizable: heavy sweetness, thick musk, the loud white flower.
I deliberately keep a scent in the zone where it hasn’t yet become ‘beautiful’ in the usual sense — where it stays a little raw, a little cool, a little unsaid.
This isn’t about modesty. It’s about precision.
Zarina Maizel fragrances are made to be beside you — not around you.
— Zarina Maizel
Zarina Maizel
This house was not started to fill a gap in the market. It began because one person needed a language that did not yet exist — a way to name the quality of light at a certain hour, the texture of silence after a fire.
Zarina Maizel is an independent parfumeur working between languages and landscapes. Each fragrance starts not with a formula but with a memory — a place, an hour, a feeling — which is then translated, patiently, into scent.
Everything is composed by hand, in small batches: the finest naturals I can source, wherever in the world they grow, and the best molecules where stability, longevity and fixation call for them. Notes are built one at a time and given time to settle, so that balance is found rather than forced. What reaches the bottle is meant to be worn close to the skin, discovered slowly by the person beside you.
We think of a fragrance less as a statement than as a keepsake — something to return you to a moment you thought had passed. Made to be precise rather than loud, personal rather than performed.
Write to us
For enquiries, samples, wholesale or press — send a note. Replies within 48 hours.
zarina.maizel@gmail.comPrivacy, orders and returns — in plain language. For anything not covered here, write to us.
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Payments are processed securely by Stripe. We never see or store your card details.
Because perfume is a personal and hygienic product, all sales are final — we do not accept returns, exchanges or refunds. Please choose carefully, and write to us with any questions before ordering. If your order arrives damaged or incorrect, contact us within 7 days and we will arrange a replacement.
Prices are shown in euros. Placing an order confirms your agreement with these terms. This policy may be updated; the current version always applies.
Zarina Maizel is a brand of Zipple LLC, a company registered in South Dakota, United States. Registered address: 25 1st Ave SW, Ste A, Watertown, SD 57201, USA. For any legal or privacy request, write to zarina.maizel@gmail.com.
How and where we send our fragrances.
We ship across Europe and worldwide. A few remote destinations may be unavailable — write to us if you are unsure.
Orders are prepared within 1–3 business days. Delivery usually takes 2–5 business days within Europe and 5–14 business days elsewhere.
Shipping is calculated at checkout. Orders outside the EU may be subject to customs duties or taxes on arrival, which are the responsibility of the recipient.
You will receive tracking once your order ships. If a parcel is delayed or lost, contact us and we will make it right.
There is no factory. No production line, no team, no machine that measures what the hand should measure.
Every bottle begins on a scale that reads to the milligram. Absolutes — jasmine, boronia, iris, oakmoss — are weighed one drop at a time, blended into spirit, and then left alone. The waiting is the work. Two weeks, four, six: the raw composition marries in the dark, and only time tells whether it was right.
I buy the best naturals I can find, wherever they grow — jasmine, boronia, iris, oakmoss. They are never quite the same twice; they carry weather, soil, the year they were harvested. And I use the best molecules for what no absolute can do: hold a composition steady, make it last on skin, fix what would otherwise be gone by noon. Both are named in the notes. The point is not purity. It is precision.
The aesthetic is dryness. Mineral, bitter, still — perfume that does not reach for sweetness to please. Stone after rain rather than sugar. Silence rather than noise. What lasts on skin, close and long, rather than what fills a room.
Each scent is composed, corrected against skin, aged, chilled, filtered by hand. Small batches. No shortcuts. A faint opalescence in the liquid is not a flaw — it is the wax of a living absolute, the signature of something that was never stripped bare.
This is slow work, made by one person, by hand. It cannot be otherwise.
3 hours · €78 · online · small groups · theory only — no materials are sent.
Five fragrances of your choosing, 2 ml each. A way to live with a scent for a few days — on skin, through a whole evening — before deciding on a bottle.
€38
Sold outDry face oil
A weightless, fast-absorbing oil that leaves skin luminous, supple and calm.
A dry, weightless facial oil that sinks in within seconds and leaves skin luminous, supple and calm. Neroli scents it softly; a considered blend of botanical oils, CO₂ extracts and skin-identical actives does the rest.