Laurie Stern
Laurie Stern grew up five houses from the Atlantic in Longport, New Jersey, where salt air and sand stuck to everything. She launched Velvet & Sweet Pea's Purrfumery in 2000, making her one of the early voices in America's natural perfume revival. While the commercial fragrance world chased synthetics, Stern staked her claim in botanicals, organic materials, and the quiet discipline of working with nature's volatility. She brought something unusual to the table: a seriousness wrapped in whimsy. Frills, furbelows, kitty tutus, and tiaras ran alongside animal conservation in her world, a combination that could seem contradictory until you understood that every bottle she created carried a small act of care. Her work earned Best of Scent recognition in 2020, cementing what the natural perfume community had known for years: Stern makes things that matter, wrapped in scent. St Stern has been a perfumer and animal conservationist since 2000. It all came together in 2020 when she created the all-natural (no...)
The hits
Notable creations
The signature
How Laurie composes
Laurie Stern builds from the ground up, starting with single botanical materials and layering complexity through patience rather than formula. She favors rose, a recurring presence across her work that she explores through the Rose Perfume Tour and her own studio experiments. Her formulations tend toward the soft, the feminine, and the quietly complex, scents that reveal themselves slowly rather than announce their arrival. Natural materials demand a different relationship with time. Stern embraces that constraint. Her perfumes change with skin chemistry, with temperature, with the hours that pass after application. She does not fight the impermanence of botanicals. She uses it. St I am a storyteller and an artist whose palette consists of pencils, paints and essential oils. Whether I create an image or a perfume my intention is to bring...
Philosophy
What drives Laurie
Laurie Stern works from a simple conviction: natural materials tell the truth. Where synthetics offer control and consistency, botanical ingredients offer unpredictability and honesty. She approaches each formulation as a conversation with the plant itself, listening for what a rose actually smells like when you strip away the industry interpretation. Her conservation work shapes her sourcing, too. Every ingredient choice carries a consequence, and Stern makes hers deliberately. She treats fragrance as a form of advocacy, a way of saying that beauty does not have to cost the earth. Her playful aesthetic, the frills and the tutus, is not a contradiction but a declaration: you can care deeply about serious things without taking yourself too seriously. St The inspired interview: the job of Nose | Carrément Belle] Meet Claire, the perfumer who has created our perfumes for nearly 10 years, and tells you more about the job of Nose and her inspirations!
The houses