I met Noah Virgile in college. We both went to Pace University in Manhattan. At the time, they were studying Musical Theatre — and I was studying the effects of recreational marijuana on the young adult mind …. Sort of.
These days, Virgile runs the fragrance house Amphora Parfum, whose scents take a darker, more sexually intriguing approach to the perfume world. The two fragrances in Amphora’s “Debút” collection, “Sublimate” and “Primal Yell” have been lauded as delightful, long lasting and a great value for their price point on Fragrantica.
One Fragrantica user, herdreamjournal writes in response to “Sublimate”, “... readers, are we in the presence of a holy grail marshmallow fragrance?”-- and I have to agree. “Sublimate” is delightfully sweet and feminine – it’s as if you took Commodity’s Milk and topped it off with healthy heap of crisp green apple and bubble bath suds.
By contrast, “Primal Yell” is hard and dark. Black cherries and hot iron on a bed of musk and vetiver. It’s a scent that demands poetry as a descriptor.
Fragrantica user, bunnylugosi writes “the bottle of red wine on the nightstand [...] hot tears and an unmade bed.” User esotericdecay responds, “... red hot anger, screaming out until it pulls at vocal cords, and hopelessly begging out of pure despair. animalic forward medicinal cherry meets fervency. smells like spilled cherry wine and crushed rose petals.” Yeah… that’s about what it smells like.
Introduce yourself to our readers! Where are you from and how did you get started?
hi! i’m noah virgile. i was born and raised just outside of boston, and i’m the youngest of three
brothers. i moved to nyc for college when i was 18 and i had absolutely no intention of going into perfumery, in any sense.
i got a bfa in musical theatre from pace university—not necessarily because i knew that performing was going to be my life, but because i knew i loved it at the time and figured that if i wanted to pursue it professionally, i needed some guidance on how to do that. ultimately, it worked out kind of well; i worked professionally from the latter half of my high school years all the way through to last year, where i got to perform in shows at places like lincoln center and the kennedy center. i really loved it (and still do), but around last summer i started getting increasingly frustrated with the industry until i eventually had to take a bit of a step back to reevaluate what i wanted out of it. in that time, my mom (the person who introduced me to perfume when i was young) suggested i take a perfumery class to occupy some of my time, and it sort of just snowballed into where i am now.
You’re a bit of a creative renaissance man. When I first met you, you were studying at
acting school. Now, your resume has tripled in size: singer, clown, makeup artist and most recently, perfumer. How do you balance it all?
my secret? i have no idea! 99% of the time i’m winging it. but, truthfully, i have the most
supportive family in the entire world, and i sincerely doubt i would be where i am now without
them. they cheer me on with everything i do, but they would never let me embarrass myself—they know what i’m capable of and will push me to meet those standards even when i
don’t think i have the capacity to do it myself. i’m a super sentimental person, so family is
always infused into everything i do, in some way or another.
i started taking pictures because my mom was always the one photographing our family trips, and i wanted her to have the same experience i would get being able to look back on candid photos of myself just existing with people i loved.
What are your favorite scents/brands? Who are your inspirations?
an impossible question that i will do my absolute best to answer. there’s a bit of backstory here.
so i’m gonna take this opportunity to talk about how i met alie kiral (owner of pearfat parfum). i
used to wear fragrance religiously—i had a few signature scents, but i was always trying new
things and putting on perfume was very much part of my daily routine. when the pandemic hit, i
got into a relationship that resulted in me developing a serious panic disorder, and i wound up
closing myself off from pretty much everyone i knew. i stopped wearing perfume entirely and i
didn’t pick up my camera for almost 2 years—things that, up until that point, had been
unbelievably important to me.
then, i was bored one day scrolling on depop (as one does) and
bumped into a scent called “kewpie doll” by pearfat parfum. i had never heard of the scent nor
the brand, but something about the bottle and name immediately spoke to me, and it was pretty heavily discounted, so i bought it and forgot about it until it showed up in my mailbox about a week later. the second i smelled it, i started crying. it’s not the most “perfume-y” scent—it smells like vinyl toys and crushed tomato leaves; like coming in from playing in your grandparents’ garden and sitting yourself in front of the tv while you play with a brand-new doll.
first off, i happen to love the scent (and everyone who’s smelled it has agreed). but beyond that, it reminded me why i loved perfume to begin with: scent can be so much more than something that smells pretty. it can be something that tells a story, challenge people’s perceptions, and carry emotions that can’t be described in words. flash forward, i now consider alie to be both a friend and a mentor—she’s given me some essential advice both in perfumery and in business, and i couldn’t be more grateful that the perfume community is filled with people like her.
Entrepreneurship is a difficult, uphill battle— especially with creative types. What
has been your approach to business?
i’ve been extremely lucky to be surrounded by the people i have in my life. my family was more
than willing to offer any advice they could in terms of business, and there are definitely
thousands of text chains us talking about anything from paperwork to health guidelines. it’s been a lot of guess work (believe it or not, there aren’t many guides for maintaining proper margins in perfumery), but one of the great things about creating a product is that selling it doesn’t feel quite so personal. i make scents that i think are good, as someone who has a lot of experience as a consumer, but i’m also very aware that no two people are going to feel the same way about a scent, even if they both love it. i’m making something specifically to elicit a reaction, and to me, a negative reaction is as useful as a positive one. there’s a scent out there for everyone, and if i know what you didn’t like about mine, then i’m going to try to make one that you will like.
it’s all about using the product as something to bring people together, without creating a need or desire for overconsumption. i’m just as happy to read a review from someone that tested one of my scents in a store as i am to read one from someone who bought the entire collection, and i hope the testers feel that their opinions are just as valid as the people who are lucky enough to have $100+ to drop on a full bottle.
The branding and marketing behind Amphora Parfum is stunning — beautiful bottle
design and captivating imagery. How would you describe the ideal Amphora customer? What’s the fantasy of Amphora Parfum?
weirdly enough, the design wound up being the easiest part. my maternal grandmother (who
passed away when i was 8) was a potter and went to school for fashion design in the ‘60s, and i pull almost all of my design inspiration from her. she worked with custom glazes, using materials like iron oxide to create incredibly unusual textures on these beautifully curvaceous thrown pieces.
she knew tomie dipaola (the author of strega nona) and did an exchange with him at
some point, where he made her a drawing called “an amphora for judy”––my logo is a digitial
rendering of that piece, created by my amazing friend evie schuckman, who also helped with
the rest of the digital design i presented with my launch (and will surely be helping me and
creating with me for many years to come). finding the right bottles was a challenge, mostly
because i had no experience in wholesale when i started, so figuring out where to source things was tough. the 50ml bottles came pretty quickly, once i found my glass provider, but it took me a while to decide on the smaller size. as a perfume collector myself, i try to keep my collection as concise as possible, which typically means purchasing the smallest size available of whatever scent i’m interested in.
that being said, a major issue i’ve had as a consumer is how smaller sizes are often an afterthought––people use cheaper glass, simpler designs, and treat them as more of an accessory to the larger collection as opposed to a real part of it. i wanted my brand to feel accessible to anyone wanting to explore niche fragrance, so it was important to me that my smaller bottles felt as much like a collector’s item as my larger bottles did. i settled on these
almost comically heavy 15ml vials that are much larger than they need to be, but that size has
allowed me to include all of the same customizations that i do with my larger bottles. when
thinking about the type of customer i wanted to attract, i thought very carefully about my price
point above anything else. there’s a culture nowadays, especially with the rise of tiktok
influencing, to collect as much as possible in the largest quantities possible, that i wanted to
avoid. i try to set my prices somewhere that’s not prohibitively expensive, but still requires a
certain amount of thought before purchasing––i want people to really consider if they connect
with what they’re getting before they buy it.
You’re in Fragrantica!!!!! Congrats!! How did you go about getting listed on the platform?
i truly wish i had a better answer for this, but: i asked around and found out that a friend of mine (alie kiral, actually) knew one of the editors on staff and would put me into contact with them.
actually, that does bring up a good point that i’ve had to work really hard to accept: you have to learn to ask people for help. i didn’t know how to get my scents on fragrantica, and i didn’t feel comfortable asking people to submit for me (they typically enter scents into the database that get recommended by members of the community, not by the perfumers themselves), so i swallowed my pride and made myself reach out. definitely don’t go around using perfumers as personal encyclopedias (or any professional in any field, for that matter), but if there’s something you don’t know and you just can’t find the answer, there’s a good chance someone you’re asking will recognize that and want to help you out.
What’s next for Amphora Parfum? Where do you see the business in five years?
oh, man… hopefully, still running! and, ideally, i would love to be at a point where the business end is starting to manage itself separately from the creative end. learning how to operate a business was unbelievably challenging, and i’m vehemently aware that there’s a ton i still don’t know.
i currently run amphora completely alone (with the exception of my brilliant digital artist, evie schuckman), which has definitely allowed me a sense of blissful ignorance to just dive in and be amazed by the cool things that have happened to me so far—but, there’s an entire world of opportunity that i haven’t even considered because it never occurred to me that i would have that kind of access.
my quick list: to get a piece of my work shown in a gallery of some kind, to find at least 10 more retailers both in the US and internationally, to collaborate with other perfumers on some scents, and to work with some non-profits on creating limited edition scents for fundraising purposes.
those things felt like fantasies before, but at this point, i think i might be safe to daydream a little more.
Amphora Parfum is available for purchase on their website, Stéle in New York and FABLAB in Stockholm.
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