Joshua Mihan
Joshua Mihan did not arrive at perfumery through the usual routes. Instead, he spent his formative years immersed in the sensory world of a traditional London barbershop, one of the city's most respected establishments where daily rituals of grooming became his education in scent. He learned how fragrance interacts with skin, how men and women respond to aromatics, and perhaps most importantly, how smell anchors memory in ways words cannot. Mihan brought this barber-shop sensibility to Melbourne when he partnered with his wife, Julia Brown, to launch Mihan Aromatics in 2017. Together, they built a house defined by restraint and authenticity. The brand quickly distinguished itself within Australia's growing niche fragrance scene by rejecting convention entirely. Where others build outward, Mihan and Brown build inward, creating scents that feel quietly personal rather than broadly appealing. Their Melbourne studio operates as a kind of laboratory of the everyday, where the familiar becomes something worth pausing over. Mihan's unconventional training gives him a perspective most perfumers lack: an understanding of scent as it lives on skin over hours, shaped by warmth and movement, rather than as a theoretical composition in a bottle. That groundedness runs through everything Mihan Aromatics produces.
The hits
Notable creations
The signature
How Joshua composes
Mihan's signature lies in his restraint. Where contemporary perfumery often moves toward complexity and projection, he works in the opposite direction, toward clarity and intimacy. His compositions tend to unfold gradually on skin, revealing layers that might go unnoticed in a single quick sniff. He favors natural materials and approaches each formulation as a study in texture as much as scent. There is a tactile quality to his work, a sense that you could almost reach out and touch the fragrance. His use of earthier notes suggests someone who spent time paying attention to the world outside the grooming parlor. He builds around mineral qualities, green accords, and quiet woods rather than the bold florals or sweet orientals that dominate mainstream perfumery. The result is fragrances that feel specific and unhurried, made for someone who wants scent to be part of a daily ritual rather than a statement.
Philosophy
What drives Joshua
Mihan approaches fragrance as an act of attention. He and Julia Brown founded their house on the belief that scent should not announce itself so much as reveal itself slowly, rewarding the wearer who pays close attention. Their genderless philosophy emerged not from marketing calculation but from a simple observation: the best fragrances transcend the categories assigned to them. Mihan is drawn to the tension between the natural world and human experience, to moments that feel both immediate and slightly out of reach. He wants his work to capture something that already exists rather than inventing something new. This means spending considerable time with materials before using them, understanding how they behave in different concentrations and combinations. For Mihan, perfumery is less about creativity in the dramatic sense and more about quiet curatorial instinct. He selects and arranges, but always with deference to the material itself.
The houses
Maisons Joshua composes for
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