Belnu Is The Luxury Clean Fragrance Brand Making Scents That Last

Graphic designer Darcy Moore’s decision to create a clean luxury fragrance house was born of a personal setback. She was diagnosed with skin cancer in 2018, and as a BRCA2 mutation carrier, she made the choice to get a preventative mastectomy the next year. During her recovery phase, she was getting dressed to leave the house for the first time in weeks and reached for her go-to fragrance. “I suddenly had this aha moment. I’ve never actually considered what’s in my fragrance, and I realized I probably shouldn’t be using this postsurgery,” she says.

California-based Moore, who formerly worked at Condé Nast and Apple as a designer and art director, also felt untethered in this moment, because fragrance was what helped her feel like herself when she was knocked down. “I was not feeling like myself more than ever after the surgery, and it just really was something that could have helped me to connect with myself and feel more confident,” she says.

Her hesitation stemmed from knowing that the brand she used was developed before the “clean” beauty wave. “It was a heritage brand, and I didn’t necessarily trust the ingredients from a clean perspective.” While clean is an unregulated term in beauty and each brand takes it upon itself to define what it means, Moore was aware that fragrance, especially, has been a particularly murky area. “Fragrance is considered a trade secret legally in the U.S., so brands don’t have to reveal what’s in the product under the term fragrance. Fragrance is listed as an ingredient, but it’s actually just a blanket term and can be a cocktail of different things.” She was concerned about specific ingredients like butylated hydroxytoluene (or BHT), parabens, and formaldehyde, as well as UV filters ​​like octinoxate and avobenzone, which are added to protect fragrance products from degrading in sunlight. “They have good intentions, but I knew I didn’t want those.”

That’s when she started doing a deep dive into what was on the market in terms of clean fragrance, and she went on to study essential oils, getting a certification remotely during COVID, as a baseline foundation. Moore ID’d brands she liked and then used LinkedIn and Google to research the perfume houses that have created scents for those brands. “COVID was on my side because so many people were connecting virtually anyways,” she says. Moore’s idea for her line, Belnu, was to lean into the functional benefits of fragrance oils and make it work for the customer in the fine fragrance space. “I wanted to work with really great perfumers and provide that kind of luxury, but in clean, fine fragrance formulas. We’re ingredient transparent, because I really believe in revealing to the consumer what’s in the formula, which a lot of brands don’t do.”

Going Green, With Safe Synthetics

Belnu’s product pages are populated with the kind of meticulously detailed information you’d only expect to see behind the scenes. Apart from the commonly seen details like top, middle, and base notes and a list of what the product is formulated without, there’s an exhaustive list of every fragrance ingredient used in the composition, detailing which part of the world it was sourced from, as well as what type of material it is. For instance, on the ingredient list for Bergamot Brio, you’ll see Tunisian orange flower and Haitian vetiver, but you’ll also learn that the former was included in the form of an upcycled absolute, while the latter is an essential oil.

Also present in these lists is the information on ingredients that have been synthetically derived, some of which include amber, musk, sandalwood, and cashmeran. Unlike many “clean” fragrance founders, Moore is not averse to using safe synthetic ingredients for multiple reasons. “When I was experimenting with pure essential oils as fragrance, I actually found that I got really bad skin reactions to them. Using anything natural in really high dosage doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for you.” With synthetics, perfume houses can alter the chemical makeup of the olfactory molecule to make it gentler on skin, says Moore.

Concerns around sustainability were also another issue for her, since harvesting large amounts of natural materials for perfumery have been known to cause devastation and near extinction of those indigenous species, Indian sandalwood being one example. Synthetic ingredients just don’t come with that sort of baggage. Moore liked the compromise of a 20-80 split in some compositions: “We use a very small amount in essential oil to get that natural, essential oil quality, and use a synthetic replica of that olfactory molecule for the rest.” She gives as an example clearwood, a biotech ingredient which has very similar properties to patchouli.

Another reason for using synthetics was to create the kind of layered complexity that can’t be achieved with only natural materials. Natural musk, for instance, originally derived from deer, has been banned in most countries since the late 1970s, and now it is only used in synthetic form. “Without synthetics, we’d never be able to use musk,” says Moore. “Synthetics also just give the perfumers more freedom to be creative, and the sky’s the limit when you can open up and use clean synthetics.” Lastly, consistency changes in natural materials was also a concern. With every harvest comes the chance of a slight difference in the odor profile of the ingredient, which can be easily controlled in synthetics.

Four Fragrances To Enhance Your Mood

Belnu’s first two scents launched in late 2024 and were created by Robertet, a 175-year-old Grasse-based heritage fragrance house. Moore approached the perfumers by briefing them about two core moods she wanted the scents to evoke. “Everyone needs to feel calm and grounded at some point in the day, and they also need a boost of energy. I felt those were two feelings and moods that are universally tapped into and desired, so I thought it would resonate and add value,” she says.

Moore describes Rose Steady as a modern, contemporary take on the iconic rose note, with incense and woods and musky ingredients to give it a grounding, genderless vibe. It’s an intense meditation on the reigning queen of flowers, a lush, syrupy immersion into a pool of unctuous damascus rose oil from Turkey, deepened by Somalian frankincense and Indonesian patchouli. There’s also upcycled cedar from Texas as well as a symphony of notes created by green chemistry, including cashmeran, bag and fig leaves, and sandalwood.

Bergamot Brio is its antithesis, a zingy elixir heroing the iconic, universally loved citrus note of bergamot. From it emanates a frisson of energetic citrus that truly punches above its weight. It’s spiked with pink peppercorn from the Reunion Islands, with playful florality in the form of Tunisian orange blossom, French lavender and verbena, and Indian jasmine, finishing with an ambery warmth. Many a citrus scent has unfortunately been plagued by an association to cleaning supplies, but banish the thought here. This is citrus vibrant and elevated.

Now, Belnu is expanding its line with two new offerings. For these perfumes, Belnu partnered with DSM-Firmenich, one of the world’s largest fragrance companies. Principal perfumers Frank Voelkl and Ilias Ermenidis, both highly regarded names in the scent world, crafted the juices around two core moods as well, one being comfort and an idea of turning inward and the other about being more intriguing to the outside world and connecting with others.

For wearers of Chai Fleur, Belnu intends to turn their energy within, burrowing into a place of comfort and succor. Its nutmeg, cinnamon, and green cardamom top (sourced from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Guatemala, respectively) is warm but never spiky, melting into a floral heart of lavender, cistus, and violet. It dries down with the cosy notes of vanilla bean (Madagascar), cypriol (India), cedar (Virginia), and sandalwood (Australia). Voelkl has bottled comfort and belonging, and smoothed down all the edges, making it snuggly without being juvenile. It’s a soft landing for grown-ups.

The Ermenidis-composed Incense Antique is an inviting smoky, incense-heavy juice that makes people want to lean in. It starts with an Indonesian black pepper, cardamom, and Italian lemon top, shifting to a tobacco leaf, Ethiopian incense, and patchouli heart before settling on the skin with warming amber, guaiac wood, and Spanish cypress. It’s a deep, full-bodied study in taking rich, forceful ingredients and taming them without fully taking away their bite. One of Moore’s favorite flowers, cistus — “a leathery, smoky floral from Spain” — features in both the new additions.

All the fragrances are wonderfully complex. Often, clean-fragrance wearers have to compromise on originality, depth, nuance, and longevity in their scent wardrobes, but Belnu turns all that on its head. When I wore these, I didn’t feel like I was making any sort of trade-off: They were crafted impeccably with intricate details, and they unfurled over time to reveal hidden facets. They were also powerful and reasonably long-lasting. Beast-mode fragrances they’re not, and while that might disappoint teenage boys, the rest of the population can rest easy.

Upcycled Cedar Meets Biotech Synthetics

Moore says the two fragrance houses helped in her mission tremendously when it came to the sustainability goals she wanted to hit. “When I chose both Robertet and Firmenich, I picked them obviously for the talent of their perfumers, but then also for the houses’ attention to sustainable sourcing, and the fact that they had properties and relationships in place to incorporate things like upcycled ingredients. They have relationships with farmers that have taken decades to build,” says Moore. Their biotechnology capabilities to create synthetics that are gentler on the environment was also an advantage.

Moore’s brief was to always use upcycling technology wherever it proved to be additive and available. In Incense Antique, as an example, Firmenich gets the cypress essential oil from a source in Spain that collects fallen cypress tree branches from which it extracts the oil. At Robertet, the upcycled cedarwood in Rose Study came from an old furniture factory in Texas, which sold the scraps from closets and furniture manufacturing. “Currently, with Firmenich, our cedar comes from Virginia, and it’s a similar process but in reverse: They distill the cedar oil, and then give the excess to create cedarwood chips for furniture making,” she says.

Moore’s first scent memory is that of the powerful sillage of Thierry Mugler’s Angel whooshing around her home, its inescapable gourmand trail following her mom as she went from room to room. “My mom has since passed, and it’s really interesting how ... one of my core memories of her is through fragrance,” she says. For Moore, perfume is also symbolic of her own different life chapters. “I love seeing it as this symbol of our growth as individuals. I’ve worn different fragrances throughout different chapters and now, I want to build out a fragrance wardrobe and help people understand that you can wear fragrances for different moods or seasons.” She likens it to fashion in that it’s fun to switch scents up and express one’s mood and unlock emotions through different fragrance profiles. With Belnu’s distinct and transportive compositions, that will come easy.

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