The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Sveva is part of Esse Strikes The Notes' Private Collection. Launched in 2023 and composed by Paolo Cerizza, the fragrance draws directly from a childhood memory of mixing raw materials in a family perfume laboratory, that hands-on curiosity that comes from handling materials before you know what they're supposed to do. The composition carries that sense of early experimentation, of learning scent by touch and instinct rather than formula. Sveva takes its name from a real Italian first name, treated less as a label and more as a way to give the composition its own identity within the house. Esse Strikes The Notes approaches each release this way, naming scents as named figures with temperament and mood rather than leaving them as unnamed bottles on a shelf.
Oud paired with lavender and saffron forms the opening trio, and the heart of Sveva builds on that platform with cedar, labdanum, and sandalwood. These three woods and resins together read warmer and more resinous than the top notes suggest, giving the fragrance a denser center that contrasts with the cooler opening. The base adds ambrette seed alongside white musk and Ambroxan, which gives the drydown a botanical, almost seed-like softness rather than the synthetic-clean musk you find in standard formulations.
The evolution
The first thirty minutes belong to lavender and saffron. The lavender reads aromatic and slightly medicinal, the saffron metallic and waxy, and the oud underneath sits as a shadow, not a statement. Within the first hour the transition begins: the top notes lose their sharpness, and cedar plus labdanum take over. This is where Sveva gets serious. The cedar is dry and structural, the labdanum warm and resinous, and the sandalwood rounds the whole arrangement into something that reads closer to old amber than modern wood. Around the three-hour mark the base takes its turn. Ambrette seed carries the botanical lift, Ambroxan adds a clean skin-like warmth, and white musk softens everything into a quiet, intimate close.
Cultural impact
The fragrance reads warm, resinous, and quietly assertive from the first spray, building through its oud-cedar-labdanum heart and settling into a soft botanical base of ambrette seed, Ambroxan, and white musk. It leans closer to a classical amber-wood composition than to louder oud stylings, with saffron and lavender giving the opening a cooler aromatic edge that contrasts with the warmer, resinous drydown. The Italian naming convention and the extrait de parfum concentration place it firmly within a niche tradition of perfumery that values material quality and composition depth over trend cycles.
