Sondrine Kehoe
Sondrine Kehoe has known what she wanted to do since she was a girl. While other children collected stickers or traded recipes, she was already macerating petals and pressing botanicals into small bottles, teaching herself the quiet alchemy of botanical perfumery long before she had a word for it. A self-taught perfumer, Kehoe originally planned to launch her own house shortly after finishing secondary school, though life carried her first into midwifery, a career that sharpened her patience, her precision, and her deep respect for natural processes. She eventually returned to scent, founding Cygnet Perfumery in 2020 from her studio in Cape Schanck on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula. The brand operates as a small-batch, artisanal affair built around hand-sourced botanical ingredients and the kind of intimate, unhurried production that larger houses simply cannot replicate. Kehoe's path stands as a quiet counterpoint to the chemistry-heavy route most professional noses take, and her work carries the particular confidence of someone who learned by doing, smelling, and listening to plants rather than formulas.
The hits
Notable creations
The signature
How Sondrine composes
Cygnet Perfumery's output leans firmly into the natural and botanical register, with compositions built around real plant materials rather than synthetic approximations. Kehoe works with hand-sourced aromatic ingredients, favoring slow methods like maceration and tincturing that preserve the character of the raw material. Her style favors clarity over complexity, allowing individual botanicals to read clearly on the skin rather than burying them in dense accords. The work carries a distinctly Australian sensibility: clean air, coastal vegetation, and the particular brightness of Mornington Peninsula light. Each release feels considered and small in scale, the product of a single maker working in conversation with her environment rather than a brief.
Philosophy
What drives Sondrine
Kehoe approaches perfumery as an extension of the natural world rather than a departure from it. She speaks about sourcing artisanal ingredients with the care one might reserve for a rare tea or a single-origin honey, and her gratitude for that process runs through everything she releases. Rather than chasing trends or building compositions designed to please the broadest audience, she privileges purity, botanical integrity, and a sense of place. The Cape Schanck studio allows her to work in close dialogue with her materials, treating each extraction and tincture as something living rather than static. Her background in midwifery informs a patience that shapes the whole creative rhythm: nothing is rushed, nothing is forced, and every fragrance is given the time it needs to settle into its final form.
The houses
Maisons Sondrine composes for
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