The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Vanitas arrives from Lvnea as a 2025 release, and the name does most of the work before the first spray lands. Paintings of skulls and extinguished candles, bowls of overripe orchard fruit, timepieces stopped at the moment everything turns. The composition holds that contradiction: golden abundance beside the quiet acknowledgment that it won't last. April Engloner, also known as April Lea, is the perfumer behind the Montreal based brand, and her catalogue already includes La Forêt Dormante among other releases. Vanitas continues that body of work, leaning into a natural perfumery approach that the house itself describes as handcrafted with reverence and care, an approach rooted in the slow craft of building scent from raw material rather than chasing seasonal fashion.
What's unusual here is the structural tension between the opening's bitter orchard brightness and the resinous, waxy base. The orris root and cocoa in the heart create a powdery, almost cosmetic hinge between the fruit on top and the beeswax-laced frankincense below. The iris note reads cool and dry, almost mineral at first, then warms as the cocoa rounds its edges, lending a soft bittersweet dusting that bridges the two halves of the composition.
The evolution
The first ten minutes are sharper than expected. Bitter orange and bergamot cut through, apricot and osmanthus underneath like preserved fruit behind glass. Orange blossom adds a faintly candied sweetness. It feels almost edible, which is the trap. Then the shift. Clove and rice arrive together, bringing a dry, almost papery warmth, and the orris root asserts itself as the structural backbone. The powder arrives softly, like dust on a velvet curtain. By the second hour, the wax has taken over. Beeswax, labdanum, styrax, and benzoin form a resinous golden close that clings to fabric. The cedarwood grounds everything beneath a faint leather undertone. Frankincense lifts just enough to keep it from going heavy. On a scarf, the trail holds well into the next day, the resins slowly oxidizing into something that smells closer to old paper and dried fig than to the opening it began as.
Cultural impact
Vanitas wears like atmosphere rather than announcement, and the beeswax threaded through its base gives it a candle-like quality that shows up within minutes of application. The wax note is doing real structural work here, not just sitting at the bottom as a sweet afterthought, but binding the resins together into something cohesive and almost edible in texture. It's a fragrance that takes its time revealing itself, and the drydown rewards patience, shifting from bright fruit and powdery iris into a dense, resinous close of labdanum, styrax, and benzoin.
