24 September 2025 |
It’s time to embrace the power of change—for your skin, body, hair, even your lifespan. Here, we present the facialists (and follicle spas!) to book, the makeup to master, and the biohacks to believe in. Plus, inspirational perfume creators and their must-spray scents.
These three former fashion insiders followed their noses into the world of scent—and never looked back.
FRANCISCO COSTA, FOUNDER OF COSTA BRAZIL
Instagram: @costabrazil
livecostabrazil.com
It started with a trip back to his home country of Brazil and an epiphany. Deep in the Amazon rainforest, Francisco Costa discovered breu, a local resin used in healing rituals to cleanse the air and spirit. One whiff of its hypnotic, earthy aroma and Costa was captivated. “Immediately, Costa Brazil became alive to me,” he says. “The olfactive signature was so obvious and exciting.”
But let’s back up. While Costa has led his skincare and fragrance brand, Costa Brazil, for nearly a decade, he was well known as the women’s creative director of Calvin Klein and for helping design some of the most prolific collections at Gucci, Balmain Couture, and Oscar de la Renta long before he became a beauty mogul. The shift from fashion to a fragrance and wellness brand was “very much an organic move,” Costa says. He visited the jungle for a reset and encountered breu, and the rest, as they say, is good-smelling history.
Costa Brazil’s scent Aroma, inspired by the resin, has smoky hints of myrrh, musk, cedarwood, and patchouli. It also has an avid cult following, perhaps not least because it is designed to provide peace of mind, balance, and focus— much like a walk in nature can do. From the start, the brand has partnered with Conservation International to ensure Indigenous communities are safe and empowered, the land is protected, and raw ingredients are sourced only by ethical and sustainable means. “We believe in nature, we believe in the science of nature, and we also believe that we can make a difference in people’s lives by really connecting to where we source ingredients,” Costa says.
In another power move, Costa recently bought back the brand’s intellectual property rights and trademarks from Amyris, which acquired Costa Brazil in 2021 and went bankrupt two years later. With that closure, “everything was kind of erased from the face of the Earth and I had to rebuild everything from scratch.”
We rarely get second chances, so Costa is relishing Costa Brazil 2.0. “I literally feel like we’re a year old because we are,” he says. “I think I have a responsibility to make this grow or evolve because we have this [sustainability] mission.” Rising from the breu-imbued ashes, Costa Brazil is back.
ANDREA MAACK, FOUNDER OF ANDREA MAACK
Instagram: @andreamaack
andreamaack.com
Andrea Maack’s fragrance career started as a performance. Well, performance art, with SMART (Smell Art), an exhibition centered on a single fragrance. The question of how to translate a drawing into a fragrance was the inspiration for the Icelandic visual artist’s show, for which she worked with a Grasse- based perfumer on a leathery-gourmand scent. Her paintings, cut into blotter- sized pieces, acted as the test strips, while Maack cosplayed as a “perfume counter girl,” passing out samples. The art blotters disappeared over the course of the exhibition but the passion for storytelling through scent lingered.
What started as a handful of scent- related art installations slowly became a full-time career for Maack, who created more and more fragrances with the help of a few esteemed perfumers. She even found herself moving away from her first passion: fashion. “I had a concept store in downtown Reykjavík,” she says. “My only customer was Björk for many years. People would come in and be like, ‘Why are you selling expensive dresses?’ She would come in and buy everything.”
Maack’s unique fragrances seem to mimic the otherworldly energy of her Icelandic milieu (the sustainable, natural scents even have local organic water and alcohol as their bases) and she has made a name for herself with unexpected note combinations and inspirations. Take Coven, which was inspired by a memory of digging up potatoes out of the muddy earth around her family’s cabin in the country’s highlands—it’s a flash of grassy galbanum, grounded with earthy cedar, oak, and clove, and has become a very emotional scent for many fans of the brand, who say they can tap into their own childhood memories when wearing it.
“Andrea’s work is standout and singular,” says the veteran fashion and culture journalist Mosha Lundström Halbert. “I view it as wearable art, with her as the stylish scent curator bringing together some of the most acclaimed noses in the biz.”
Marking the 10th anniversary of the brand, Maack recently launched her first floral fragrance, Muse, an ode to a tropical vacation with sticky notes of mango and coconut, paired with touches of gardenia and sweet pea. After all, even Icelanders crave a beach getaway.
YASMIN SEWELL, FOUNDER OF VYRAO
Instagram: @vyraoworld
vyrao.com
With over 25 years spent in fashion, Yasmin Sewell built a career on finding the next big designer and predicting new trends. “I was always tapping into my intuition when I was doing those things—it guides everything that I do,” she says.
It led her to open a boutique during the late-Nineties in London’s Soho, where brands and designers were featured for their individuality. “I just looked all around the world for things that resonated with me,” Sewell says.
She then slid into a run of impressive roles, including buying director of the luxury retailer Browns, chief creative officer of Liberty London, fashion director of Moda Operandi, and vice president of style and creative at Farfetch. Shifting away from this upper echelon of fashion into the world of fragrance might sound unusual, but again Sewell trusted her intuition. “I always knew that at some point in my life I would move into the holistic wellness world,” she says.
Fragrance wasn’t specifically on Sewell’s vision board, but she knew she wanted to do something in “energetic emotional wellbeing,” as she describes it. Having trained in meditation and quantum medicine, Sewell wanted to create a product that would alter the user’s mood and vibration, and voilà, Vyrao was born in 2021.
The fragrance brand blends neuroscience-backed and sustainably sourced ingredients with “energy medicine,” which includes color, crystals, and affirmations, to create fragrances dedicated to energy amplification. “We’re living in a crazy, chaotic, intensely anxious world, so if the fragrance that you spray reminds you to feel protected, to feel love, self-compassion, freedom, liberation, creativity, or all these things… I believe that’s incredibly good for you. It transforms you instantly.”
The beautiful scents are undeniably inviting. Made in collaboration with perfumers that include Lyn Harris and Meabh McCurtin, all Vyrao fragrances have notes channeled by Sewell’s psychic, Katt Nicholson, while the energy healer Louise Mita, who taught Sewell Integrative Quantum Medicine, charges the Herkimer crystals (said to have emotional-healing and energy- raising properties) that are found in each 50 ml bottle.
Things are heating up this fall with the launch of two new “arousing” scents, Ludatrix and Ludeaux, which are centered on passion, sensuality, and seduction. Ludeaux, a scent designed for flirtation, features notes of peach, magnolia, and sandalwood, as well as a hint of latex accord. Ludatrix, meanwhile, has a lipstick accord, Sichuan pepper, romantic rose, sensuous musk, and cedarwood. Its provided mantra may as well speak for Vyrao as a whole: “I Spray, I Play.”
Taken from 10 Magazine USA Issue 05 – TRANSFORMATION, BIRTHDAY, EVOLVE – on newsstands September 18. Order your copy here.
PHOTOGRAPHS: MICHELLE HUYNH.
PORTRAITS: FROM TOP, WESTON WELLS, ANNA MAGGY, COURTESY OF VYRAO
Text KRISTIN LIMOGES
