Long before niche perfumery became crowded with meticulously engineered “concept” brands, Sarah Schwartz approached fragrance not as a beauty entrepreneur, but as a conceptual artist exploring emotion, contradiction, and human psychology through scent. Trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and active in the art world since the 1970s, Schwartz worked in enduring materials such as marble, bronze, and granite before turning her attention toward the ephemeral medium of fragrance. Unlike many perfumers whose paths began within fashion houses, cosmetic laboratories, or luxury conglomerates, Schwartz entered the world of scent through an entirely unconventional route — handmade soaps embossed with provocative paired words such as “vice/virtue” and other opposing concepts that reflected her fascination with duality, language, and the tension between conflicting emotional states.
Proverbs Soaps:
Her journey into olfactory art emerged almost organically through experimentation with soap as an accessible artistic medium. “At first, it was inexpensive and I could do it,” Schwartz recalled. “I could make a mistake and throw it away, and it cost pennies.” That freedom to experiment without consequence became essential to her creative process. What began as a tactile exploration of form, texture, and language soon evolved into deeply personal handmade objects crafted for friends and family. Each stamped soap carried the sensibility of a miniature conceptual artwork — intimate, playful, and psychologically charged — foreshadowing the philosophical approach to fragrance that would later define her work.
The “Proverbs” soap series represented Schwartz’s inaugural foray into the art world as a business. This collection was distinctive for its innovative concept of embedding contrasting messages within each soap, such as "vice" on one side and "virtue" on the other, and other pairings like "wisdom" and "folly" or "lust" and "horror." Schwartz’s work delved into the interplay of dualities, pairing scents like vice and virtue with rose, ecstasy and purity with iris, and sex and panic with orange. “I create ephemeral objects imbued with meaning,” Schwartz explains, emphasizing the soap’s thematic focus on dichotomies and the relationship between physical cleanliness and spiritual purity.
Schwartz favored glycerin for its rich lather and excellent rinsing properties, and its translucent quality resonated with her conceptual approach. “The translucent quality has everything to do with the concepts behind the words,” she notes, highlighting how the soap’s clarity allows messages to be read from multiple perspectives.
By 1992, Schwartz expanded her creative efforts into a commercial venture with a line of embossed soaps available in specialty boutiques. She soon began casting custom molds in various shapes, including rings, bowls, frogs, and cherubs. “I find that I'm trying to work on uncompromised art, things that have meaning for me, that have some impact on the world,” Schwartz says. Her creations, while aesthetically pleasing, were intended to transcend mere functionality.
Drawing inspiration from Jenny Holzer’s tradition, Schwartz gained recognition for her sculptural and engraved translucent soaps. She was committed to using high-quality ingredients, including glycerin, aloe vera, and vitamin E, and her soaps were priced between $10 and $70. They were prominently featured in Barney's New York and Collette's in Paris, and actress Goldie Hawn was known to be a notable admirer.
In her New York studios, Schwartz crafted intricate reproductions of iconic forms, such as the Venus of Willendorf, symbolizing her exploration of decadence and fertility, and the Akua'Ba, a Ghanaian fertility goddess made from glycerin. She also created multi-colored cherub sculptures designed to dissolve in the shower, further showcasing her diverse and imaginative artistic vision.
Readers familiar with the iconic yellow bar of soap featured on the cover of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club might be surprised to learn that this soap was actually created by Proverbial Inc., Sarah Schwartz's company. The soap, prominently displayed on the cover, became a symbol of the novel's themes of rebellion and identity, further showcasing Schwartz's knack for creating objects imbued with deeper meanings. This collaboration underscores the cultural reach and impact of Schwartz's artistic endeavors beyond the traditional art world.
Perfume Veils:
What began as intimate objects given to friends evolved into a small artisanal soap line sold in boutiques by the early 1990s. Through this process, Schwartz became increasingly captivated not simply by fragrance as adornment, but by scent as emotional architecture: something capable of revealing hidden impulses beneath outward appearances.
This philosophy ultimately became the foundation of Proverbial, the independent fragrance company Schwartz established in New York. Determined to understand perfumery beyond surface glamour, she immersed herself in the discipline with unusual seriousness, even traveling to Grasse, the historic cradle of French perfumery, where generations of fragrance houses perfected the art of extraction and composition. There, surrounded by fields of jasmine, rose, and orange blossom cultivated for centuries, Schwartz began refining her own ideas about scent as a form of narrative abstraction. After numerous experiments and reformulations, she introduced Perfume Veils in 1995, a trio of fragrances that embodied her recurring obsession with emotional opposites: Pure/Deceit, Lucid/Agony, and Beauty/Ravish. The names themselves suggested that no emotion exists in isolation — purity contains temptation, clarity conceals pain, beauty courts danger.
Rather than launching the fragrances through a department store counter or glossy beauty campaign, Schwartz debuted the collection in a manner far closer to contemporary art practice. The scents were introduced at the Sonnabend Gallery, where the perfumes were displayed alongside Schwartz’s artwork in bowls overflowing with miniature bottles. The presentation blurred distinctions between gallery object and cosmetic product, inviting visitors to experience fragrance as conceptual art rather than consumer luxury. From there, the line quietly entered an influential network of avant-garde boutiques including Barneys New York and carefully curated specialty shops across New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Washington, and London’s Space NK. The expansion was modest yet culturally significant, placing the fragrances among tastemakers drawn to intellectual minimalism rather than mainstream trends.
The perfumes themselves stood in sharp opposition to the dominant olfactory mood of the late 1990s. At a time when the market was increasingly flooded with transparent aquatic florals and airy minimalist compositions inspired by fragrances like Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue or L'Eau d'Issey, Schwartz deliberately pursued something darker, denser, and more intimate. She described wanting fragrances “with more body,” scents that felt sensual and psychologically textured rather than merely fresh or clean. Working with the fragrance house Florasynth, she created compositions intended not only to stand independently, but to interact with one another through layering. The fragrances could be worn singularly, combined in pairs, or merged altogether, creating shifting emotional effects depending on how they overlapped on the skin. This notion of olfactory layering echoed the conceptual dualities embedded in the names themselves — identity was fluid, contradictory, and perpetually unfolding.
Bottles & Packaging:
The Perfume Veils were presented with a strikingly intellectual and sculptural approach to packaging, one that rejected the ornate romanticism traditionally associated with prestige perfumery in favor of something quieter, darker, and psychologically charged. Conceived by Sarah Schwartz with consulting by Jilly Simons, the presentation extended the conceptual themes of the fragrances themselves with remarkable sophistication despite the project’s fiercely independent nature and relatively modest budget. Rather than evoking boudoirs, flowers, or gilded glamour, the packaging resembled modernist sculpture, archival objects, or experimental art publications — restrained yet deeply evocative.
The fragrances were housed within two-piece telescoping tubes constructed from spiral-wound liner board with curled disc ends, their surfaces wrapped in an ultra-dark matte violet paper so deep in tone it appeared nearly black under low light. The effect was mysterious and secretive, like sealed ritual objects or private documents preserved in shadow. Sparse silver labels interrupted the darkness with understated precision, printed in clean Scala Sans typography whose cool metallic sheen glimmered softly against the matte paper like moonlight across velvet. The restraint of the exterior conveyed a deliberate sense of concealment, suggesting hidden meanings beneath a controlled and elegant surface.
Inside, the presentation became even more intimate and psychologically layered. The fragrances themselves were contained in clear two-ounce cylindrical flint glass bottles, their minimalist transparency emphasizing form, light, and the subtle champagne tones of the perfumes within. Each bottle was etched with a fragrance name accompanied by a second obscured word visible only through the liquid itself, creating an unsettling and fascinating visual duality. Pure concealed Deceit. Lucid hid Agony. Beauty veiled Ravish.
These blurred secondary words appeared almost submerged within the perfume, ghostlike and partially obscured, as though emerging from the unconscious mind. Schwartz conceived these pairings as expressions of contradiction and duality — reflections of the hidden emotional tensions that exist beneath outward appearances. The bottles therefore functioned not merely as perfume containers, but as conceptual objects exploring identity, desire, restraint, and psychological ambiguity. Even the pale champagne coloration of the fragrances seemed intentionally deceptive, their luminous clarity masking the darker emotional undertones implied by the hidden text.
The structural details of the packaging reinforced this balance between industrial minimalism and refined luxury. Each bottle was fitted with a 20-millimeter crimp cap featuring raised twice-fired palladium identification, paired with a silver-finished Valois fragrance pump and actuator that introduced a subtle metallic elegance without disrupting the austere design language. The bottles rested within a raw aluminum plinth marked by visible blade-cut scoring, recessed bottle placements, and stamped identifiers, giving the presentation the feeling of a precision-crafted art object or architectural maquette. The unfinished aluminum surface introduced a cool industrial severity softened only by the felt-lined base beneath, which added tactility and quiet refinement.
Altogether, the Veils packaging achieved a rare synthesis of conceptual art and luxury perfumery: minimalist yet emotionally dense, severe yet seductive, transforming the act of opening and wearing fragrance into something introspective, tactile, and psychologically immersive.
1995 & Beyond:
By the mid-1990s, Sarah Schwartz had begun quietly expanding the world of Perfume Veils beyond fragrance alone, treating scent as part of a larger sensory and philosophical environment rather than a single luxury product. In 1995, Schwartz announced plans to introduce a trio of scented candles scheduled for release in the fall of 1996, extending the collection’s atmospheric and emotional language into the home. Alongside the fragrances, hand-cast glycerine soaps and later candles transformed the line into a complete tactile experience — objects intended not merely to perfume skin or interiors, but to create moods of introspection, contradiction, and intimacy.
By 1999, the Perfume Veils fragrances were selling for $30 per two-ounce bottle, while the candles and soaps appeared in museum shops and carefully curated gift boutiques, settings that suited the collection’s artistic identity far more naturally than conventional department store perfume counters. Their placement within cultural and design-oriented retail spaces reinforced the idea that these objects belonged as much to the world of conceptual art and independent design as to commercial beauty.
Despite the intellectual sophistication and increasingly devoted cult following surrounding the line, Proverbial Inc. remained deeply handmade and fiercely independent. By 1997, Schwartz and her small team were still personally filling sample vials, hand-labeling bottles, and assembling products within a modest workspace on Warren Street in Manhattan. This small-scale production process became central to the authenticity of the project. In an industry increasingly dominated by multinational beauty corporations and aggressively marketed luxury brands, Perfume Veils retained an almost anti-corporate spirit.
The fragrances did not feel engineered for mass appeal or focus-grouped consumer trends; instead, they carried the intimacy and irregularity of artist-made objects. Schwartz herself spoke candidly about her modest ambitions, remarking that she would simply be happy to reach $100,000 in annual sales — though she laughingly admitted more would certainly be welcome. That humility only deepened the line’s credibility. Perfume Veils was never conceived as a mass-market commodity or celebrity-driven luxury label, but rather as an ongoing artistic investigation into scent, language, psychology, and the fragile contradictions hidden within identity itself.
By 2000, Proverbial Inc. continued to cultivate its quietly unconventional presence through open houses and sample sales that reflected the eclectic sensibility of the brand. These events featured the Perfume Veils fragrances alongside hand-cast soaps, scented candles, and even then-fashionable pure rubber band bracelets, creating an atmosphere closer to an artist’s studio gathering than a traditional luxury fragrance event. The mixture of conceptual fragrance, handmade bath objects, and contemporary accessories reinforced Schwartz’s refusal to separate art, commerce, and daily ritual into rigid categories. Everything existed within the same emotional and aesthetic universe.
What ultimately made Perfume Veils so distinctive was its refusal to separate beauty from intellect. Schwartz approached fragrance not merely as adornment, but as a philosophical and emotional medium capable of expressing contradiction, vulnerability, seduction, concealment, and revelation simultaneously. At a time when minimalism in fragrance marketing was becoming increasingly polished and commercialized, her work occupied a far stranger and more compelling territory somewhere between conceptual art installation and intimate personal ritual.
The fragrances were designed not simply to smell beautiful, but to provoke thought, unsettle emotional certainty, and expose the dualities lurking beneath modern identity. Hidden words beneath translucent liquid, severe sculptural packaging, and psychologically charged pairings transformed each perfume into an exploration of the subconscious itself. Perfume Veils did not ask merely how a fragrance should smell — it asked what scent could reveal about the hidden emotional lives of those who wore it.
The Fragrances:
The three fragrances of the Perfume Veils collection were conceived less as separate perfumes and more as emotional variations on a single hidden structure — like three different states of mind moving through the same dreamscape. Sarah Schwartz designed them so they could overlap and intermingle, sharing a richly aromatic heart and a deep resinous base while altering only the opening note, allowing each fragrance to reveal a different emotional “veil” over the same sensual core. The result was unusually intimate and psychological for 1990s perfumery: the fragrances feel simultaneously meditative, shadowy, herbal, sacred, and erotic, as though ancient spice markets, hidden chapels, and private memories had all been folded together into liquid form.
At the center of all three compositions lies an extraordinary aromatic accord built around spice, herbs, woods, and sacred resins. The warmth begins with Ceylon cinnamon, prized from Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon, whose cinnamon differs profoundly from the harsher cassia varieties commonly used in commercial products. True Ceylon cinnamon possesses a pale, delicate sweetness with airy facets of warm pastry, dry bark, soft clove, and honeyed wood. In perfume, it feels less aggressively spicy and more luminous — almost silky — wrapping the composition in a golden warmth that glows rather than burns. Beside it is Spanish origanum, a perfumery-grade oregano note that smells far more nuanced than culinary oregano. The Spanish variety, grown under the intense Mediterranean sun, carries dusty herbal facets touched with camphor, thyme, and wild mountain air, lending the fragrance an austere aromatic dryness that cuts through the sweetness of the woods and resins.
The herbal tension deepens through basil from the Comoros, one of perfumery’s hidden treasure regions. Comoros basil has a uniquely spicy-green character with hints of anise, crushed stems, pepper, and humid tropical vegetation. It smells alive and slightly dangerous, adding vivid freshness while amplifying the darker spices beneath it. Chinese spearmint introduces a cool metallic greenness unlike peppermint’s icy sharpness. Chinese-grown mint often develops smoother, sweeter carvings of mint oil because of the climate and soil composition, producing a scent reminiscent of crushed mint leaves rubbed between fingers — herbal, damp, and softly sweet rather than medicinal. This coolness moves against the heat of Jamaican clove bud oil, one of the richest clove materials in perfumery. Jamaican clove is dense, dark, and fiery, with an almost numbing medicinal richness full of eugenol, the naturally occurring aroma molecule responsible for clove’s unmistakable warmth. Eugenol smells simultaneously spicy, woody, smoky, and faintly carnation-like, and in these fragrances it gives the heart a smoldering pulse beneath the herbs and woods.
French cypress introduces an austere evergreen shadow — dry, smoky, and resinous, evoking dark groves in the south of France after rain. Cypress oil has facets of pencil shavings, cold forest air, and incense smoke, helping connect the aromatic herbs to the sacred frankincense deeper in the composition. Brazilian rosewood contributes one of the most hauntingly beautiful tonalities in the perfumes: a silky, floral wood note with hints of rose petals, polished furniture, lavender, and warm citrus. True rosewood oil, historically sourced from Brazil’s rainforests, became increasingly restricted because of overharvesting, making it both luxurious and controversial. Modern perfumery often recreates aspects of rosewood synthetically through aroma chemicals like linalool and rosewood reconstruction accords. Linalool itself smells delicately floral, woody, and citrusy, and here it amplifies the natural softness of the lavender and basil while smoothing the sharper herbal edges.
French lavender threads through the fragrances with a cool violet-blue softness that feels less rustic than English lavender and less medicinal than some Balkan varieties. Lavender from Provence possesses a uniquely refined profile shaped by the mineral soils and intense sunlight of southern France: airy herbal sweetness layered with coumarinic hay facets and delicate floral freshness. This lavender acts almost like a veil itself, diffusing the sharper spices into something dreamlike. Beneath it rises holy frankincense, the sacred resin long burned in temples and churches for thousands of years. Frankincense cannot be fully replicated through natural extraction alone because much of its mystical “burning resin” character only emerges when heated, so perfumers frequently enhance it with synthetic incense molecules such as Incense Absolute reconstructions, Cashmeran, or Iso E Super. These molecules contribute dry radiance, soft ambered woods, and the sensation of warm skin or heated stone, giving the perfumes their spiritual, meditative darkness.
The shared base is rich, creamy, and almost tactile. Indian sandalwood — historically among the most treasured materials in perfumery — forms the emotional foundation. Genuine Mysore sandalwood from India possesses a uniquely creamy, lactonic softness unlike Australian sandalwood, which tends to smell sharper and drier. True Indian sandalwood unfolds in layers of warm milk, polished wood, soft smoke, and human skin, creating an almost narcotic sensuality. Because natural Mysore sandalwood became extraordinarily rare and restricted, perfumers frequently support or reconstruct it with molecules such as Sandalore, Javanol, or Ebanol. These synthetics intensify sandalwood’s creamy diffusion while preserving its velvety warmth, allowing the fragrance to linger like warm skin beneath fabric.
Moroccan cedarwood introduces dryness and architectural structure to the base. Cedar from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco carries a smoky, leathery depth with dusty desert undertones unlike the cleaner pencil-shaving quality of Virginian cedar. It gives the fragrances a solemn, slightly shadowed backbone that prevents the sweeter notes from becoming overly soft. French vanilla softens the darker woods with a creamy amber glow. Natural vanilla absolute contains hundreds of aromatic facets beyond simple sweetness — tobacco, suede, dried fruit, rum, smoke — but perfumers frequently intensify its warmth with vanillin and ethyl vanillin. Vanillin smells creamy and familiar, while ethyl vanillin is richer and more confectionary, together amplifying the natural sensuality of the vanilla without overwhelming the spices and woods. Indonesian patchouli anchors everything in darkness. Patchouli from Indonesia tends to be especially rich and earthy because of the humid climate and traditional aging process. It smells of damp soil, antique wood, cocoa, moss, and shadowed fabric, adding depth and mystery while binding the entire structure together.
Against this shared architecture, each fragrance reveals its individual emotional identity through a single dominant floral opening. Pure/Deceit begins with Italian neroli, distilled from the blossoms of bitter orange trees grown in the sunlit groves of Italy. Italian neroli is sparkling yet bittersweet — luminous orange blossom wrapped in green stems, citrus peel, white petals, and honeyed pollen. It gives the fragrance an illusion of innocence at first encounter, but as the darker herbs, incense, and patchouli emerge beneath it, the “deceit” hidden within the purity slowly reveals itself.
Lucid/Agony opens with Turkish damascena rose, among the most revered roses in perfumery. Roses grown in Turkey, particularly around Isparta, develop extraordinary richness because of the region’s cool nights and mineral-rich soil. Turkish rose oil smells velvety, wine-dark, honeyed, and faintly lemony, with spicy undertones that blend seamlessly into the clove and cinnamon heart. Rose itself cannot produce the full scent of a living flower through extraction alone — much of a rose’s radiant freshness is recreated using molecules such as phenethyl alcohol, citronellol, geraniol, and damascones. Damascones are especially important here: they smell like dark fruit, dried petals, tea, and plum, giving the fragrance its haunting, melancholic richness. The result is a rose that feels intellectually clear yet emotionally wounded — lucid, but carrying hidden agony beneath its beauty.
Beauty/Ravish opens with ylang-ylang from the Comoros, one of the world’s finest sources for the flower. Comoros ylang-ylang is extraordinarily lush: narcotic banana blossom, creamy jasmine, warm skin, spice, and tropical humidity all unfurling at once. The flower’s naturally sensual character is often amplified in perfumery with molecules such as benzyl acetate and p-cresyl methyl ether, which enhance its creamy floral richness and slightly animalic undertones. Here, the ylang-ylang spills over the woods and incense like golden silk over dark velvet, creating the most overtly seductive of the three compositions. Yet even this beauty contains danger — the ravishment implied in the name emerging slowly through the smoky clove, shadowed patchouli, and sacred woods beneath the flower’s lush tropical radiance.
Together, the Perfume Veils fragrances feel less like conventional perfumes and more like scented psychological portraits — meditations on contradiction rendered through spice, resin, woods, and flowers. Their unusual layering structure allows innocence to become darkness, clarity to become sorrow, beauty to become obsession. The natural materials provide depth and emotional realism, while carefully chosen aroma chemicals extend diffusion, create abstraction, and reveal nuances nature alone cannot fully express. The result is a trilogy that feels intimate, intellectual, and strangely timeless — perfumes that behave like whispered secrets carried on warm skin.