The 10 Magazine Eau de Parfum launch arrived at The Dorchester this morning, and it asked a question that most anniversary projects dare not: how do you compress twenty-five years of a creative vision into a single scent?
The answer, it turns out, involves red sequoia wood, Himalayan cedarwood, saffron, vetiver absolute, white peach and pepper. And, perhaps more usefully, it involves Azzi Glasser.
The Perfumer Behind the 10 Magazine Eau de Parfum Launch
Glasser, the award-winning perfumer behind The Perfumer’s Story, has spent her career building fragrances that do precisely what a good novel does: situate you somewhere specific and refuse to let you leave. Her collaborators have ranged across fashion and film alike. On the designer side, she has worked with Alexander McQueen, Jasper Conran, Nicole Farhi, Lucy in Disguise and Bella Freud. Her bespoke commissions, according to the Scentbird Podcast, begin at £15,000, a figure that speaks to the particularity of what she does. Scent, in Glasser’s hands, is not ambient decoration but portraiture.
For the 10 Magazine fragrance, her subject was Sophia Neophitou, 10’s global editor-in-chief, who became the muse for a brief that was equal parts memoir and manifesto. “Creating 10 Magazine Eau de Parfum was very personal because my associations with smell have always been about memory,” Neophitou said at this morning’s event. The brief reached into her childhood: woody base notes of red sequoia wood, vetiver absolute and Himalayan cedarwood carry the memory of a cologne her father wore; the warmer, lighter top notes (saffron, pepper and white peach) were her mother’s register.
The result is a limited-edition, unisex fragrance. That balance was deliberate. “I was trying to achieve that balance of masculine and feminine which very much represents what we do at 10 Magazine,” Neophitou explained. A scent that smells of both parents seems, in retrospect, an entirely logical shape for something meant to hold twenty-five years of a publication inside it.
An Intimate Morning, a Considered Guest List
The launch itself was kept close. Sarah Mower, Val Garland and Anders Christian Madsen were among those in attendance, alongside 10’s global fashion director Karen Binns. Mikai McDermott, Lola Clark and Emilia Silberg also came. It was the kind of room where the conversation probably moved faster than the canapés, which is as it should be.
Drinks were provided by Omoss, a seamoss-based drink the brand describes as nutrient-rich, which made for a fresher alternative to the usual launch-morning champagne. Photography across the morning was handled by James Kelly.
What the morning underlined, beyond the pleasure of the fragrance itself, is how rarely a magazine anniversary project earns its occasion. The instinct, when a title reaches a milestone, is to commission something decorative: a collector’s cover, a hardback retrospective, a tote bag. Neophitou and Glasser chose instead to build something that requires you to actually wear it, to carry it around on your skin and see what it does to a day. That is a different kind of confidence. A fragrance either works in the world or it doesn’t; there is no styling it out of a bad note.
Glasser’s track record suggests she knows which side of that line she operates on. A roster that spans high fashion to bespoke personal commissions, from Bella Freud to the silver screen, is not assembled by accident. The 10 Magazine Eau de Parfum launch is, in that sense, a considered piece of casting: Neophitou brought the memory, Glasser supplied the form.
The 10 Magazine Eau de Parfum is available now as a limited edition.
