The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Killian Wells is the brand owner and perfume maker at Xyrena, a house that has turned pop culture into wearable form, including a fragrance called Plastic by Trixie Mattel by Xyrena, and an extrait tied to the American Psycho name. The fragrances aren't polite. They reference specific images, specific textures, specific decades, and they bottle the feeling of a moment you almost forgot. Synthesis arrived in 2024 as the most stripped-down entry yet. Where other houses build complexity, Wells stripped the brief to two materials and let them argue. The official description names the target: the strangely intoxicating sweetness of vinyl pool toys fresh from the store.
Most fragrances use synthetics to recreate nature. Synthesis skips the pretense entirely. The heart lists rubber and vinyl as the explicit materials, no abstraction, no accord to soften the impact. The main accord is listed as plastic, which tells you everything about the perfumer's intent. The result lives in its own lane, not a recreation of a flower or a wood but a deliberate capture of an industrial material that most people encounter in everyday objects. The rubber note arrives with a particular weight, a density that grounds the brighter vinyl sweetness above it.
The evolution
Synthesis doesn't evolve so much as insist. The rubber-vinyl heart arrives fast and stays put, refusing to fade politely into a woody base or a vanilla drydown. What changes is the temperature. On skin, the opening reads almost hot, the sweet plastic buzzing slightly as body heat activates it. Within the first hour, that sweetness settles into something cooler, less candy and more like a wet surface drying in shade. The drydown doesn't introduce new notes, it simply quiets the ones already there. The vinyl becomes less inflatable-toy bright and more like the surface of a pool toy that's been handled, picked up, and tucked under an arm on a hot day. The sweet edge dulls, but the character holds. The composition maintains a steady presence on skin through the day, and the last stretch reads as a close, skin-level signal that stays with the wearer rather than filling a room.
Cultural impact
Synthesis occupies a strange space in fragrance. It reads less like a traditional perfume and more like a single-material study, a bottle that refuses the usual pyramid of top, heart, and base in favor of one explicit target. Some wearers who've reviewed it describe it less as a fragrance and more as a tool, something to layer under leather, suede, or violet-based scents to push them into unexpected territory. The vinyl note has a specific use case among certain wearers, applied as a modifier beneath other compositions to add a sweet, plastic edge that most mainstream fragrances don't offer on their own.
