The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
URBIS PARFUMS names each fragrance after a city, then distils that city's character into liquid form. COMO refers to the Italian city on Lake Como, a place of aristocratic villas, cypress-lined shores, and that particular stillness that settles over water at dusk. Sofia Bardelli built this fragrance around an escape. The official copy says it plainly: this is your escape from the city noise. Not a holiday scent or a postcard abstraction, something closer to a mood. The atmosphere of a place where the pace drops, the light goes golden, and you stop checking your phone for an hour. Bardelli translated that into a composition that opens cool and green, then settles into something warmer, longer-lasting, and unexpectedly personal.
What makes COMO interesting isn't any single material, it's the conversation between them. Fig is inherently sweet and lactonic; pink pepper is dry and slightly biting. Watery notes read cool and mineral; amber adds warmth underneath. These contrasts could fight. Here, they take turns. The top third of the wear belongs to freshness, green, aquatic, bright enough to feel clean. But as the minutes pass, the fig's creaminess and the musk's velvet start to show through, and the fragrance stops being about freshness and starts being about comfort. That's the payoff. A scent that begins as an escape from something and becomes an attachment to something else.
The evolution
The opening arrives crisp and immediate, pink pepper prickles for thirty seconds, then green notes take over, that milky herbal snap of crushed fig leaf followed by something cooler, almost aquatic. Like opening a window onto a lake in early morning. The transition happens around the thirty-minute mark: the watery notes thin out and fig steps forward, not sweet exactly, but present. Warm. The amber hasn't announced itself yet, but you can feel it waiting. By the second hour, the musk comes up through the base. Soft, velvety, close. This is where COMO stops being a fresh fragrance and becomes something else, personal, quiet, the kind of scent you stop noticing on yourself only to catch it again when you move. The cedar and ambrette hold everything together through the drydown, which lasts into evening on most skin types. Clean but not empty. Warm but not heavy. Lingers on fabric like lake light on still water.
Cultural impact
COMO landed in 2024 into a fragrance landscape that had grown saturated with statement scents, loud, projecting, designed to announce arrival. This went the other direction. The market had quietly begun rewarding subtlety. Consumers who'd worn oud and ambergris were turning toward freshness, toward intimacy, toward scent as personal rather than performative. COMO arrived in that moment, a green-aquatic that refuses to shout, built for the hour after the last meeting rather than the entrance. It's the kind of fragrance that older houses would have released twenty years ago and called classic. In 2024, it feels like a corrective.
The House
URBIS PARFUMSURBIS PARFUMS is a British fragrance house launched in 2023, dedicated to translating the cultural character of cities around the world into scent. The brand takes its name from the Latin word for city, and each fragrance in the collection draws inspiration from a specific destination, from Monaco and Tokyo to Nairobi and Samarkand. Rather than replicating geographic coordinates or tourist stereotypes, the collection aims to capture the mood and spirit of place through carefully constructed olfactory narratives. The line spans ten releases as of 2024, with the entire catalog organized around destinations rather than traditional fragrance families.
The Creator
Sofia BardelliSofia favors a laboratory‑first approach, testing dozens of variations before committing to a final accord. She gravitates toward bright, aromatic spices such as ginger, which she describes as a “spark that awakens the senses.
