Heritage
A house, in its own words
The story of Eau de Boujee begins not with perfume but with candles. Boujee Bougies served as the original creative vehicle for Nick Gilbert and Pia Long, two professionals who operated as fragrance brand consultants before launching their own venture. Their work advising other companies on scent strategy informed their desire to create something entirely their own. The candle line allowed them to explore architectural and spatial approaches to fragrance composition, building scents that transformed rooms rather than individuals. Over time, customers and readers began asking whether these candle scents could exist in a format suitable for personal wear. The question planted the seed for what would eventually become Eau de Boujee. The concept emerged from literally expanding or zooming out the candle fragrances to create compositions that performed differently on skin versus in the air. This translation from spatial to personal fragrance required fundamental adjustments to concentration, sillage, and development over time. The founders established their fragrance laboratory in 2016, which became the operational foundation for both brands. Their decision to partner with Accords & Parfums at Domaine Sainte Blanche placed their work within a framework connected to the legacy of perfumer rooke Odore Roudnitska, whose work on Diorissimo and others established benchmarks in the field. The brand launched in 2021 with an initial collection and has expanded to eleven fragrances as of recent counts, with releases distributed across 2023 and 2024.
Eau de Boujee describes its own approach using the term postmodern perfumery, a framework that treats established fragrance conventions as material to be examined and reworked rather than simply followed. The brand explicitly asks a rhetorical question that encapsulates its stance: why smell ordinary? This framing suggests an intention to resist formulaic compositions that rely on familiar structures without sufficient justification. The founders bring backgrounds in fragrance consulting, which means they have evaluated countless briefs, market positions, and creative directions for other brands. This experience appears to have informed their interest in working against industry conventions. Their descriptions of individual fragrances avoid conventional category language, instead emphasizing the specific materials and conceptual intentions behind each composition. The brand's relationship with frankincense illustrates this specificity. They have structured their work around what they call a trifecta of ancient perfumery materials: incense CO2 extract, frankincense essential oil, and frankincense resin. This tripartite approach treats frankincense not as a single note but as a spectrum of olfactory possibilities, each extracted and processed differently. The founders operate as a partnership where Long handles the perfumery technical execution while Gilbert shapes creative and visual identity, a division that allows each to work deeply within their domain.