Simonetta Giurlani Pardini
Simonetta Giurlani Pardini has built a career as a perfumer whose work moves easily between fine fragrance, fashion houses, and independent perfume culture. Her name appears on creations for Ralph Lauren, including Big Pony 2 for Women, a fragrance that recast the familiar pony-crowded equestrian figure with a fresher, airier take on vanilla. The designer's association carries a certain distinction: Big Pony has long occupied a distinctive visual place in perfumery, and her contribution updated that language for a new generation. She has also lent her talents to fragrance projects connected with brands such as Lubin and Etat Libre d'Orange, though she appears equally comfortable working beyond the conventional house structure. Perhaps most tellingly, she is the author of La pianista, a novel that suggests a creative life shaped by music, storytelling, and an instinct for atmosphere. Public details about her training remain scarce, but her credits speak clearly enough. She composes scents with narrative instinct, working with the precision required by established houses while preserving a sense of the personal and the unexpected.
The hits
Notable creations
The signature
How Simonetta composes
Giurlani Pardini's signature moves toward clarity of expression and refined textural contrast. Her work with vanilla demonstrates a preference for lightness and air, treating sweetness as something to be edited and reshaped rather than simply amplified. Across her known contributions, including Big Pony 2 for Women, Hannastr, and a fragrance for Etat Libre d'Orange, the emphasis falls on balance: warm notes held in check by brighter accords, and materials that reveal different facets as a scent develops. Her approach favors elegance with a quietly individual edge, which suits a perfumer equally at home with a fashion house and with a more independent project. She appears attentive to the emotional weight of ingredients, choosing them for the feeling they produce rather than for easy recognition. The result is a body of work marked by restraint, curiosity, and a particular sensitivity to how fragrance changes over time on skin.
Philosophy
What drives Simonetta
Giurlani Pardini approaches perfumery as a form of storytelling rather than a technical exercise. Her work draws on nature, art, and personal memory, a combination that gives her compositions their reflective quality. The freshness she brought to Big Pony 2 for Women, where vanilla moved away from sweetness toward something lighter and more luminous, shows a willingness to take a familiar material and change its emotional register entirely. Working across fashion houses and independent projects, she treats each brief as an opportunity to build atmosphere rather than simply decorate a surface. Her literary sensibility, evident in La pianista, reinforces an ear for rhythm and mood. In fragrance terms, that translates into compositions that reward attention to their details: the opening brightness, the shape of the heart, the way a texture settles against skin. She does not chase novelty for its own sake. Instead, she looks for the point where a material becomes suggestive, where a composition begins to suggest a world beyond itself.
The houses