Alessandra Castelbarco
Alessandra Castelbarco approaches fragrance the way a poet approaches verse: with precision, emotion, and an unwavering belief that scent can hold memory. Trained by masters in both Italy and France, she began working with fragrance at fourteen, an unusually early start that gave her an almost intuitive relationship with raw materials. Today, she stands as both nose and creator behind Amarsi Fragrances, a house built on the conviction that perfume should feel like a return to something essential. Her Sardinian roots color much of her work, transforming Mediterranean light and island air into something you can wear. She travels extensively, collecting impressions the way others collect stamps, and every bottle she fills carries the residue of somewhere seen, tasted, or felt deeply. In an industry where many perfumers remain anonymous, Castelbarco has made her identity part of the story.
The hits
Notable creations
The signature
How Alessandra composes
Her style leans toward the natural and the narrative. Castelbarco gravitates toward high-quality raw materials, particularly those with Mediterranean origins, and builds compositions that feel rooted rather than abstract. She favors clarity and contrast over complexity for its own sake, allowing each ingredient space to speak. There is an immediacy to her work, a quality of first impression that lingers rather than dissolves. Her signatures include a certain sun-warmed quality, a balance between freshness and depth that suggests open air and stone walls and sea breeze. She is not interested in shock; she is interested in recognition. The wearer should feel seen, not surprised.
Philosophy
What drives Alessandra
Castelbarco believes that fragrance exists at the intersection of memory and desire. She creates not to follow trends but to capture something harder to pin down: a specific afternoon, a fleeting feeling, the exact quality of light in an unfamiliar place. Her process begins not in a lab but in the world, where she gathers impressions and later translates them into liquid form. She speaks often of distilling emotion, of giving form to what resist description. For her, a perfume succeeds when someone smells it and feels understood rather than impressed. She resists the idea of fragrance as luxury accessory, preferring instead to think of it as companion, as autobiography, as something that lives close to the skin and changes with it.
The houses