Meet Strangelove, the Cult-Favorite Fragrance House Powered by Oud

Most people who have smelled oud, well, they aren’t smelling real oud. Instead, what they’ve encountered is some beast-mode approximation. Real oud behaves differently. It still projects, but there’s more movement and depth to the ingredient. It isn’t shouting across rooms like the imitations. It also shifts throughout the day. Like any high-quality fragrance, a great oud is alive.

A great oud is what Helena Christensen found in 2010. She was in Elizabeth Gaynes’ Manhattan apartment. Their sons were in school together, and Christensen came to pick hers up one afternoon. The oud enveloped her as soon as she entered—and Christensen notes that her sense of smell is intensely pronounced; the impression was gobsmacking.

“It was almost like a little explosion in my brain that I physically could feel,” Christensen tells me. “Like when you see a movie and it does a speedy montage of all life that came before you. Back to the beginning of time, where there were just amoebas and then dinosaurs. It was very intense and potent, like what a lucid dream would smell like before you wake up.”

That oud was not part of any finished perfume. Gaynes had brought it back from Borneo, where she had been working closely with agarwood distillers and agricultural partners. The material was still raw, resinous, and dense with its signature volatile warmth. Gaynes was also mulling over ideas for what to do with it and how to turn it into something spectacular and wearable—years before oud became the note du jour.

Christensen’s creative instinct kicked in: She wanted in on whatever Gaynes would do with the stuff. It led to a long-term collaboration called Strangelove, a New York-based brand whose limited selection of elegant fragrances all feature oud. Each fragrance is more alive than the last, each like a lucid dream.

Gaynes came into perfumery through her background in sourcing. She had been working in agricultural sustainability (primarily in Borneo), collaborating directly with distillers and growers who were cultivating agarwood and patchouli through long-term, land-stewardship farming models.

Her understanding of oud came from the material itself, watching how the resin formed inside the wood over time, how each distillation varied by climate and season, and how deeply linked the scent was to place.

Gaynes has also been involved in restructuring how patchouli is sourced. “All the little farms would grow the patchouli, they’d distill it in their backyard, then they’d all come into the village and they’d pour everything into a pot,” she says. “There was really no transparency. They didn’t really know what was mixed in with it and they didn’t have any set pricing for it either.”

Working with Givaudan, Gaynes helped establish a 600-acre patchouli farm that moved production to a farm-to-factory model, where the material could be traced, evaluated, and purchased directly from growers.

That early work shaped Strangelove’s sourcing philosophy. The brand’s oud is now produced in India, drawn from smallholder farms and independent distillers Gaynes continues to know personally. Consistency, for her, comes from sourcing relationships built slowly and maintained directly. That philosophy also extends her sustainability ethos into the brand’s own longevity.

“This was before sustainability was a buzzword,” Gaynes says. “But it’s the root of everything I do.”

When Gaynes and Christensen decided to create a fragrance brand (originally called ERH1012), Gaynes didn’t build out a full line. She released a single perfume oil in 2014: Dead of Night, built of course around natural oud. Gaynes’ peers thought it would be off-putting to include the word ‘dead’—again, for something that feels so alive—but the name is a nod to the Beatles’ Blackbird lyrics, a soothing, calming melody that suits the scent in question.

“If it says ‘Dead of Night,’ at least it’s going to catch their eye and make them stop and smell it,” Gaynes laughs.

Christensen’s role as Creative Director also helped open key meetings for the brand. Yes, we’ve been talking about that Helena Christensen all this while; Gaynes says Christensen embodies the exact “authentic luxury” that the brand is built on.

Gaynes, installed as founder and CEO, recalls early meetings with figureheads at Estee Lauder, Harrods and more, where people recognized she was ahead of some big oud curve to follow. And so, she launched Strangelove at Harrods’ Salon de Parfums, with a single perfume oil, among heritage houses and long-established prestige lines. It was a star-studded affair, too, with the top scent names in attendance: the Creeds were there, as well as the Chanel and Guerlain teams, plus Roja Dove, Xerjoff’s Sergio Momo, and Kilian Hennessy too.

“After that event, we had other luxury perfume boutiques reach out to us to have Strangelove in their collection. Customers knew immediately we had real oud and a lot of it,” Gaynes recalls. “Customers would come in with just a picture of the bottle on their phone since we were quite unknown then,” she adds. “I knew we had to build our collection, but at the same time I didn’t want to rush our creations.”

From the start, Gaynes and Christensen have worked with the prestigious indie perfumer Christophe Laudamiel to round out the Strangelove roster. (Plus one scent from perfumer Hamid Merati-Kashani.) That lineup now has six core oud-based atomizer parfums, each above 25 percent oud concentrations—“Among the highest of real oud in the market,” Gaynes states proudly. Plus, they have pure perfume oils in each name, as well as two body oils in their debut Dead of Night scent.

Christensen recalls the earliest trialing stage of Strangelove, which mirrors the rounds of revision necessary on each new scent, too: “I’d have little spots on my body where I had the 96A, the 96B, whatever labels we gave to each version,” she says. “All day long I would wear them, and at the end of the day I would take little notes, or see which ones get the most reactions and questions.”

Each new scent goes through hundreds of iterations before reaching shelves, Gaynes says, and each has hundreds of ingredients. “What is published on our site is just the main notes in each. The actual list is so long and detailed.” That kind of calculation requires the real-world market research of trying things in the wild. To see how each version behaves across hours, environments, and constant go.

That strategy means that, since its launch, Strangelove has brought only six scents to market. In addition to Dead of Night (the most beautiful scent I have ever smelled in my life,” Christensen says, with just a hint of bias), these include the sparkling, peppery Fall Into Stars; the dark chocolate and ginger-laden Melt My Heart; Silence the Sea, which blends ambergris, tuberose, and incense; the champaca-and-gardenia-forward Lost in Flowers; and A Fire Within, this writer’s favorite, which calls to mind the smoky embers of a well-made campside blaze. Despite the limited selection, Strangelove has been selected to serve as the official scent partner of the 2026 Grand Masked Ball at Versailles.

The stay-small, stay-intimate approach behind Strangelove means that everything takes added time. The formulas take time to construct, particularly when built around natural oud. The batches vary, even as the oud itself changes from one season to the next, based entirely on that year’s crop. (It’s a lot like the variables of wine making, or aging whiskey and cognac in different oak expressions.) So the evaluation requires patience, as does each new batch of the core scents.

“It really does take us two years to finish,” Gaynes explains. “And if I was listening to what everybody was saying, I’d never get anything done. And it wouldn’t be my vision.”

And right now, there is a pivot back to the brand’s own roots. Before Strangelove had atomizers, it had oil, like the one launched at Harrods. So a redesign of those perfume oils is in store (they’ll be re-issued as “attars”), alongside future scent rollouts that are currently in development stages. Aside from that, Strangelove is staying the course.

Christensen reflects on how much she cherishes her role with Strangelove, and the ongoing development of new accords: “The brand’s fundamental approach to sourcing and nature is most special to me. Nature is the most important thing in my life besides family. The fact that one of the things I do in life is working so closely with a piece of nature just makes me really grateful and happy.”

As for Gaynes, it is that overgrown, less-trodden path that also provides purpose: “We could be on every corner, producing faster and with less care, if I wanted to go that route. But I don’t,” she says. “I’m not in it for the fast money. I am in it to grow a business in the right way without compromising the brand at all. I love what I do. When people fall in love with one of your fragrances that you worked so hard and carefully to produce, how could you not be proud of that?”