Sustainability goes beyond just adding the word to the product label on your perfumes. A truly green brand will use methods that will cause minimal impact on the planet, reuse the ingredients, reduce waste, go for nude or recyclable packaging, reduce its carbon footprint, and work with suppliers who take a similar sustainable approach.
India’s first 100 per cent green perfume brand
When it comes to fragrances, one brand that is making some serious moves in being earth-friendly is NASO Profumi. So, what does sustainability mean to the brain behind the brand? “It means to 'save'. To procure without harm, recycle and reuse what you can. We practise sustainability from the minute we start saving water while brushing our teeth every morning to indulging and investing in a greener lifestyle,” explains Astha Suri, creative director and founder, NASO Profumi.
With an emphasis on breaking gender barriers and introducing greener practices, this new on-the-block perfume brand offers unisex scents that are created using ingredients grown in-house in its distilleries in North India.
Suri who is also the nose behind the gender-neutral scents, aimed to launch her brand in 2020, right when the pandemic hit. Suri and her team took the additional time they had to educate customers about NASO’s ingredient bases and focused on making testing kits of their perfumes for their audience. Some people do find it strange to buy a fragrance without sniffing it in real life first, after all it can be challenging to provide an olfactory experience virtually. With NASO, Suri hopes to bring a modern twist to ancient Indian perfumery while making the process entirely sustainable.
The brand uses pure extracts from Indian herbs, spices, and attars from the base of all its signature scents. It blends these notes with floral oils carefully sourced from Northern Europe, Egypt, and Indonesia. The best part? The brand carries out a 100 per cent eco-friendly and zero-waste production process. The by-products generated are converted into compost, and rainwater is harvested and used to water the farmlands. Apart from this, the brand taps into solar power instead of other sources of electricity for their workplace. The brand also encourages consumers to reuse their perfume bottles and candle jars by opting for refills instead of discarding them altogether.
Image source: Instagram/NasoProfumi
Breaking barriers
When it comes to scents, the heavier, muskier notes have been traditionally reserved for men, while powdery, floral fragrances have been set aside for women. NASO stays true to its progressive stance and thinks beyond the gender binary to create scents for everyone. “I think having gender bias in anything–not just perfumery–limits an individual from truly exploring what is available in the market,” explains Suri.
“When someone walks into our studio, we want to let the scents do the talking and expose our audience to all the ingredients we have. If you don’t take a gender-biased approach to create perfumes, you get a chance to blend extremely varied scents and everyone walks out with their own unique blend,” she adds.