Sunyata Calogeros-Smith
Sunyata Calogeros-Smith did not arrive at perfumery through the conventional route. Born in Canada with Greek heritage woven into her identity, she spent years working as a somatic psychotherapist before scent became her primary language. The name Sunyata, borrowed from Sanskrit, speaks to her attraction toward emptiness and presence, the spaces between things. As someone who processes the world through an AuDHD lens, she found that perfume offered something talk therapy could not: direct access to emotional memory without the interference of language. She began studying fragrance creation with the rigor of someone who had already learned to listen deeply, to notice what rises in the body before the mind names it. Today she runs Untamed Perfumes, a house built on the conviction that scent can hold and communicate what words cannot. Hers is not a story of career reinvention so much as continuity, the same impulse toward healing translated into a different medium.
The hits
Notable creations
The signature
How Sunyata composes
Sunyata's style resists the predictable architectures common in commercial fragrance. She favors natural materials and botanical complexity, working with the irregularities that make natural ingredients unpredictable and alive. Her compositions tend toward layered depth, where initial impressions give way to quieter developments rather than announcing themselves fully in the opening seconds. She has a particular sensitivity to texture and contrast, building fragrances that feel physical, that register on skin as much as they do in the air. The neurodivergent dimension of her perception shows in her work: she notices connections between materials that formal training might not surface, combinations that reveal unexpected resonance. Her style is intimate rather than broadcast, composed for the wearer rather than for the room.
Philosophy
What drives Sunyata
For Sunyata, fragrance is not decoration. It is a tool for accessing parts of the psyche that resist verbal articulation. Her approach borrows from somatic therapy's insistence that the body knows what the mind forgets. She composes with the understanding that scent travels pathways connected to memory and emotion before it reaches conscious recognition. This background shapes everything: she thinks about how a fragrance will land in someone's nervous system, whether it will steady or unsettle, whether it creates permission or resistance. She is interested in fragrance as a form of holding space, in creating scents that allow the wearer to feel something rather than merely smell something. Her work resists the performative. She makes perfume for people who want scent to mean something beyond projection or signaling.
The houses