BDK Parfums is launching its fourth collection, featuring three absolutes centered around a single base note: wood. Not as a comforting note, but as a framework—what Jordi Fernández calls, with a precision worth noting, “texture and structure in perfumery, just as fabrics are for fashion.”
Ten years ago, David Benedek founded a perfume atelier in Paris whose uniqueness lay less in its niche positioning than in its method. His studies at the Institut Français de la Mode had trained him to interpret materials—olfactory silk, velvety notes, powdery accents—before even smelling them. The Studio Collection, launched on May 18, 2026, takes this concept to its logical conclusion: each absolute is inspired by a fabric. Stellar Silk is inspired by silk, Oud Paradisio by leather embroidered with purple stones, and Silver Ceremony by sequins.
Fernández, the in-house perfumer at Impadia, works at Givaudan with a palette of raw materials selected under the Orpur™ certification—the house’s “grands crus,” individually chosen for their traceability and cutting-edge olfactory profiles. For Stellar Silk, he selected two distinct Venezuelan tonka bean absolutes: one with notes of warm tobacco and praline, the other with a toasted character and hints of dried cocoa and hay. The tonka bean, harvested in the Amazon exclusively by natural fall—a guarantee, as the technical sheet specifies, of an aroma at its peak—functions here not as a generic gourmand accord, but rather as a textural note, in dialogue with Iris pallida butter from the Landes region, obtained through molecular hydrodistillation of its rhizome.
Sidebar — Extraction Details: The Madagascar vanilla CO₂ extract in the collection is obtained using supercritical CO₂ rather than solvents, a process that preserves a more almond-like aroma while minimizing the tobacco and rum notes characteristic of the classic absolute. This precision in extraction alters the perceived balance of the base note.
The choice of wood as a common architectural element in all three creations stems from an aesthetic decision championed by Fernández in terms of tactile logic: Australian sandalwood for silk—“rich, creamy, and fluid”—, Thai oud for leather—“an animalic character” that complements the “richness and resilience” of leather—and Moroccan Atlas cedar for metal. “I chose woods because they embody texture and structure in perfumery,” he says. This statement has technical implications: wood is the aromatic class that provides a fragrance’s longevity, its skin-clinging quality, and its temporal dimension. By assigning wood a structural role analogous to that of fabric, Fernández is redefining the vocabulary of fragrance composition.
In Silver Ceremony, the “metallic” effect is not achieved through classic metallic notes but through a combination of Moroccan cedar, Spanish cistus labdanum (cold-distilled to blend balsamic freshness with amber warmth), and an exclusive Givaudan molecule — Azurone™, an ozonic marine note with an aldehydic touch — which, together with the radiance of Italian citrus fruits (Calabrian bergamot harvested at early maturity, lemon cold-extracted before molecular distillation, green mandarin), recreates through olfactory synthesis the sensation of light striking metal. It is a calculation, not a metaphor.
The bottles—50 ml and 100 ml—come in a black sleeve with bright silver hot stamping and a lacquer finish on both the inside and outside. The color of each sleeve (smoky brown, purple, blue) is chosen to evoke synesthesia, not to follow trends.
The question posed by the Studio Collection is not that of fashion as a medium of communication for perfumery—that is a familiar concept. The question lies elsewhere: Can wood be treated in perfumery the same way fabric is treated in fashion—as a structural element, rather than mere decoration? What Fernández has created here resembles less a thematic collection than a demonstration of method.
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