BIOGRAPHY OF A SCENT: GRAND LARCENY
The ST. ROSE founder Belinda Smith unpacks the story of the subversive rose fragrance, available only at VIOLET GREY.
Written by LAURA REGENSDORF
Fragrance has a way of bringing the faraway—in time or space—to this very moment. For the ST. ROSE founder Belinda Smith, her first experiments with scent served as counter-programming to her work in fashion, as well as a sensory portal to her childhood in rural Australia. An interest in natural materials and traceability put her outside the usual lanes for perfume development, but a pioneering partnership with a global fragrance house helped propel ST. ROSE’s vision for ingredient transparency and creative expression. Here’s how one subversive scent, Grand Larceny, came to life.
THE SCENE
Australia has always been home for Smith, even after her father’s job relocated the family to the United States. She would shuttle back across the equator after the school year wrapped, leaving her living in “perpetual winter,” she jokes. “That tie to the land never left me.” As she transitioned from a fashion career, she found fragrance to be an expressive outlet: “I was one of those people making potions in my kitchen.” She began to imagine a new set of considerations around sourcing and ingredient integrity, though early meetings with fragrance houses failed to get traction. Determined to pave her own way, she sought out a sandalwood supplier in Australia with indigenous stakeholders and ethical harvesting practices. A chance encounter at a United Nations event led her to Givaudan, which agreed to work with ST. ROSE as its first transparent partner. “We're not doing clean for clean’s sake,” says Smith, explaining that the company, which launched in 2020, leaves room for safe synthetics. “I want incredible fragrances that are provocative and cool, that I want to wear.”
THE NAME
“Grand Larceny is a little wink to my Australian heritage,” Smith says. As the various mods (an industry term for formula drafts) came rolling in, the phrase popped into her head, jogged by a bit of lore. “I have an auntie that’s a bit of a history buff,” she says. The story that surfaced traces back to 1802, when Thomas Peters—a relative going back several generations—was sentenced to death in London for a robbery. As Smith tells it, Peters was in his early 20s with a pregnant wife. “He and a couple of his mates stole a dozen silver spoons from a lord’s house.” In lieu of execution, he was shuttled off to a faraway island of misfits. “It’s a badge of honor in Australia if you can say that your family is linked back to one of the convict ships,” says Smith, citing the “very rebellious, very resilient culture.” By the time she learned about Peters, complete with a newspaper clipping from London’s Morning Post and Gazetteer, the revelation made complete sense: “We have a little bad blood in our line.”
THE SCENT
For Smith, the initial mood of a fragrance arises from a collection of visual and sonic references. “Colors can help pinpoint ingredients,” she says, as when the repetition of red suggests a whiff of rose. For this scent, she pulled together images of diamonds against a crisp black backdrop, and a smashed bouquet of roses on a leather car seat. Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman,” with its driving energy, was another entry. “I wanted something you could wear from day to date night—glam and sophisticated but almost in a femme fatale way,” she says. “The opposite of demure.” The New York–based perfumer Caroline Sabas had previously created ST. ROSE’s best seller, French Poetry, so Smith wanted to work with her on another enveloping floral. The result—heady rose and geranium set against patchouli, sandalwood, and vetiver—is “opulent and seductive,” says Smith, “but it also has this edgy, dangerous allure.” It’s the type of complex fragrance that stops passersby and unfolds over the course of the day. “If you spray it on your jumper, you’re going to smell it the next time you wear it.”
THE DESIGN
Smith wanted the bottle to feel timeless, so it could sit on anyone’s vanity—neither overtly feminine nor so minimalistic as to disappear into the increasingly crowded fragrance landscape. She designed the label herself, choosing a typeface that lived between modern and old-world contexts. Last year, they invested in custom packaging, which is a leap for an indie brand. The new glass bottle features a threaded pump for easy refilling, along with more finessed details. “We added Art Deco–inspired fluting on the edges of the glass,” she says. There’s also a flash of silver just below the cap. “Like jewelry, fragrance is one of the last adornments that you put on your skin before heading out for the day.” As for the scent samples, she paid homage to the tiny splash bottles she’d spotted while vintage shopping. The VIOLET GREY Edit includes a quartet: Grand Larceny, along with L’Été 67, Jack of Hearts, and Juliet in White. Little glass baubles, they’re sized for summer travel—and unlike Peters, you get to pick the destination.
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