Holly Tupper of Cultus Artem

Profile: My fascination with the art of creating adornment, from jeweler making to fragrance, started at an early age. When I was a child, there was a neighborhood parfumerie downstairs from our apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that would formulate fragrances for private clientele. The gentlemen who owned the shop were gracious enough to let a 10-year-old into their space to witness their craft and experiment with my own ‘creations’.  I remember one saying, “That’s lovely dear, smells just like Tweed.” Of course, I had No Idea at all what ‘Tweed’ was and that it was indeed a fragrance. My Great Aunt Maude kept an elegant vanity table in her One Fifth Avenue apartment with a mesmerizing display of unguents and flacons. It was early sense memories and experiences like these that shaped my own aesthetic and subsequent career path.

Holly Tupper jewelry

Upon graduation from Tulane University with a major in Fine Arts, I moved back to my hometown, New York City. The advice for a couple of careers before thirty led to a stint in the music business and a nearly decade-long career in the brokerage business as a bond salesman on a large trading floor. Shortly after marrying and moving to Texas (where my atelier is currently based), my husband and I moved in the late 80’s to Singapore where I launched my successful jewelry brand. My life in South East Asia and its sights, sounds and smells along with my career as a bespoke jewelry designer, with my designs sold at Holt Renfrew and at my own Singapore boutique, led to my renewed interest in fragrance making and the creation of Cultus Artem.

Holly distilling raw materials

It was in Singapore that I started seriously exploring fragrance creation, leading to time spent studying perfume making in Grasse, France, where I took advantage of my proximity to independent and multi-generational family owned natural raw material distillation companies and forged my own personal relationships. I also studied in Bangkok, Thailand. It was many of these same companies that I turned to in the creation of Cultus Artem perfumes, using the finest naturally derived individual perfumery ingredients.

Cultus Artem Vetiveri

Fragrance connections, combinations have been swirling in my amygdala for ages.  I think the smell of places is one of my biggest muses for creation.  The smell of champaca blooms on the air in Bukit Brown Cemetery in Singapore, the unseen and ethereal mixed with the fecundity of jungle leaf matter, moist earth and petrichor. Or vetiver grass dried and in a gunny sack on the street in front of an herbal ayurvedic shop in Chennai bringing back memories of travelling through small towns and villages in the late 1980’s and early 90’s at dusk when the fires are lit to ward off mosquitoes and dinner preparations commence. So, fragrance combinations have been growing inside of me for decades. I just kept formulating until I felt I had arrived at a complete starting collection.

My approach to fragrance is also inspired by the way that great jewelers spend their lives contemplating gemstones – among the most precious raw materials produced by nature – and how these master craftsmen see their primary task to be revealing the stone’s individual beauty and character. I have made some distillations of wild crafted native plant species- not to try to create a commercially viable ingredient so much as to understand the process better to be a better-informed composer/perfumer. I like to get deep in the woods with the making process, it is a tactile experience. The magic in natural perfumery ingredients is their nuance and soul being made up of multiple molecules created in nature, grown in the earth, defined by wind, rain, terroir, instead of the single molecules synthesized in a chemist’s laboratory. The single most defining reason I embarked on creating a natural fragrance collections was my disappointment with how the loveliest fragrance experiences had been so diminished by the rush to reformulation with synthetics.

At Cultus Artem not only am I the creative director and founder but additionally the perfumer. So many founders have gone a more traditional route of hiring outside fragrance houses to manufacture on their behalf. We manufacture inhouse – we have incredibly strict procedures and vet the creative process thoroughly with our own in-house chemist as well as an independent toxicologist who’s based in Europe and runs analysis for compliance. To be my own master in the creation process and not having to bend to commercial demands of others is beyond liberating. This independence has afforded me the opportunity to create fragrances defined by my intention to create using natural materials and not have to reference ‘trends’. I am for the ‘slow fragrance’ movement and the de-commodification of the sector. I am trying to move from the space where the artist can be separated from the art in its final form.

Cultus Artem Champaca perfume

My aspirations for Cultus Artem are simple, yet the process has been anything but. We explore traditional, labour-intensive techniques and the precious raw materials of perfume’s golden age with a bold spirit of contemporary creativity. Cultus Artem hopes to offer something truly rare- a portal to timeless elegance.

Holly’s perfume organ

On American Perfumery: As an American perfumer I think this is an exciting time because I don’t feel the need to follow global corporate industry rules for creating ‘marketable’ perfume. We launched our first collection of eight natural but haute luxury fragrances in September at Bergdorf Goodman. Currently, but particularly in America there are so many intersecting debates going on in fragrance and cosmetics between ‘clean, natural, transparent’ and, we at Cultus Artem sit in the very middle of the cross roads as we are radically transparent in our ingredients and methodologies, natural and fully compliant with EU/IFRA regulations but also truly a haute luxury brand with the quality of our ingredients like  Orris butter, Osmanthus, French Tuberose, wild crafted Champaca and more, housed in custom-designed, super luxurious packaging, inviting the wearer to a transportive experience.

via Wikipedia Helen Frankenthaler

Favorite American Artist: My favorite artists generally are disruptive women who have been trend setting, ground-breaking, maverick explorers- women who transcended what was expected of them. Gown wearing, engine oil changing, fly across the ocean in a single engine airplane or ride a camel alone across a desert type of women.  I particularly favour Helen Frankenthaler, an abstract expressionist painter from New York City.   Her work spanned six decades and she was an important contributor to the movement. I feel even more connected to her as she and her husband Robert Motherwell lived in a brownstone down the street a half a block from where I grew up. Her use of color and resultant texture are an inspiration in my work.

I love this quote of hers … “There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules, or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.”

–Holly Tupper, Founder, Creative Director and Perfumer for Cultus Artem

Cultus Artem Alba (magnolia blossoms), Ilex (mate and jasmin), Vetiveria (vetiver), Tuberosa (tuberose and gardenia), Amara, Poeticus, Champaca and Rosa

Thanks to Holly Tupper of Cultus Artem we have a discovery set valued at $285 for a USA ONLY reader. You must be a registered reader. To be eligible please leave a comment with what you found fascinating about Holly Tupper’s path to perfumery and which of her perfumes might appeal to you the most. Draw closes 3/14/2020

Cultus Artem Poeticus was reviewed by Contributor Alexandre Helwani here

Holly Tupper is our 150th American perfumer in our series, which officially began in 2011 with Dawn Spencer Hurwitz of DSH Perfumes.

All photos belong to Holly Tupper unless otherwise noted.

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