Yasmin Sewell launches wellbeing-inspired perfume Vyrao into Mecca
Following a stellar career in fashion, Yasmin Sewell blends her passion for wellbeing into a fragrant new venture.
Scent has an extraordinary power to alter your mood or transport you to another place and time.
A whiff of apple pie might take you back to your grandmother’s kitchen, or a crisp sea breeze back to childhood holidays on the beach.
But what if a scent had additional powers? To not only transform your mood, but even shift your energy and improve your overall wellbeing?
Yasmin Sewell believes that it can. “The connection between scent and emotion has always been there,” Sewell tells The Australian.
“Any great nose (perfumer) will talk about the emotions, the memories that are evoked through scent. So we know that it’s such a powerful tool for shifting your emotions.
“Healing through the senses, for sure I really believe in that.”
Sewell’s new passion project is Vyrao – launching with a range of five perfumes that each have an intention for the wearer, be it self-love or protection, for example.
Sewell has long been a believer – and practitioner – in alternative therapies, and is trained in Reiki, flower remedies, and something called Integrative Quantum Medicine, which she describes as a blend of kinesiology and energetic healing.
For many, all of this may be a step too far. But there are plenty who are intrigued and curious; the complementary and alternative therapies market is expected to grow by 22 per cent year on year, to reach $404bn by 2028, according to a 2021 report by Grand View Research.
Add to this the overarching wellness industry, which a 2021 McKinsey report, Feeling Good, found is currently worth about $US1.5 trillion ($2.08 trillion) globally – and is growing by up to 10 per cent a year.
“My belief and passion for (healing) is around what we feel and what we’re thinking and how that affects the physical body,” Sewell says.
“I thought a lot about scent being so potent with shifting emotions. I did a bit more research into the healing powers of plants, herbs and flowers. We know that as well.
“Aromatherapy we understand is scent and healing.”
But perfume is newer territory. There are just a few brands in the space, including The Nue Co, a wellness company which uses fragrance to improve focus or energy, in the same way that essential oils might. Clean perfume company Heretic’s Dirty Grass functional perfume includes CBD oil among other ingredients known for their relaxing properties.
Fashionable start
That Sewell would move into something to do with wellness was perhaps not surprising, given her lifelong passion for the subject. However, that she would move into the beauty industry was a little more unexpected.
For 25 years, Sewell has been synonymous with fashion – an impossibly stylish, global industry figure whose career has seen spectacular successes and a few crushing lows.
The Sydney expat first made waves with her London boutique, Yasmin Cho, in the Cool Britannia ’90s (Courtney Love was a regular customer). She was later headhunted by iconic London retailer Browns to champion intriguing, upcoming brands for its offshoot Browns Focus and would later become buying director for the whole show.
Moving into retail and creative consultancy, she was responsible for the reimagining of London’s iconic department store Liberty.
She was appointed with much fanfare alongside other industry heavy-hitters to transform Conde Nast’s Style.com from a runway editorial site to ecommerce player. However, the ill-fated venture closed just nine months after it launched, in 2017.
Most recently, she was vice-president of style and creative for its purchaser, FarFetch.
In 2019, after leaving FarFetch, she was unsure of her next move.
“I wanted to take time out. And I was going through a (difficult) personal time, finalising a divorce. It was a good time to pull back.
“I focused on my kids, I focused on making my home my home. I painted my house green. The first thing that came to me was I just want everything to be green. It’s a healing colour, too.”
While she didn’t know what her next move would be, she did know “it was time to do what was really in my heart”.
“So I sat with that, knowing that I would move into something to do with healing and wellness for sure – that was always my thing – but not knowing what it really was, not knowing it would be Vyrao, not knowing it would even be fragrance.”
You could argue that what had served Sewell so well during her career in fashion – an eye on what was about to come over the horizon – would also serve her well in whatever she put her hand to next.
“I did feel a big shift coming, a big shift in people’s awareness and what they really cared about. What they would connect with would be something else, not just things that looked cool with a great image, but something with a deeper purpose and meaning.
“I felt we were moving into this age of consciousness.”
Come the pandemic, so too came the rise of the conscious consumer – customers who want to buy products that are environmentally sound.
On that note, in addition to any potential wellness benefits, Sewell says that Vyrao is almost 90 per cent natural ingredients, based in organic sugar cane alcohol, and that synthetic oils have only been used when the plants are being overfarmed unsustainably.
Fresh shoots
The green of Sewell’s London home would soon be translated into a name for her as-yet-undecided project.
Vyrao is a “more beautiful” variation on the Latin verb vireo, “which means ‘I am verdant’.”
Upon deciding to marry perfume and healing properties, friends recommended perfumer Lyn Harris (of Miller Harris) to help create the scents.
While Sewell says she was “super intimidated” to meet Harris and pitch to her, she said Harris’s face lit up when she heard the concept.
“She was the first person I presented this idea to who wasn’t a mate. If she had looked at me like I was strange I probably wouldn’t have done it.”
There began a working process that started during the pandemic and its lockdowns, with the pair emailing about flower remedies and the healing benefits of different plants.
“The way that we worked together was very different. I gave her the bunch of emotions I wanted us all to feel – freedom, liberation, protection, self-love, sensuality, empowerment – and then I left her for a few months to do her magic work.”
She also called on her IQM teacher, Louise Mita, to help add a “little bit of magic”.
“There are definitely healing qualities in these plants and flowers but what could be the conduit for energy? How do we channel good energy into a product?”
Mita suggested adding a Herkimer diamond crystal – known in crystal circles as the most powerful of crystals for healing and positivity – to each bottle.
The final suite of fragrances launched last year in their colourful bottles – another anomaly in the minimalist, black-and-white luxury world that Sewell was keen to upend. They encompass the range of aforementioned emotions, from Georgette, named for her grandmother and which promotes self-love, to the empowering Witchy Woo. (“Everyone told me that I wasn’t allowed to call it Witchy Woo and I was like, I am going to call it Witchy Woo,” she recalls with a chuckle.)
Magnetic “is about protection and attraction, attracting goodness to you. It’s quite a spiritual one, I feel it’s like carrying a sacred church with you. They’re all androgynous (scents), but this is the most traditionally masculine smell because it’s so woody.”
“Free 00 is probably the most delicious – genuinely loved by everybody. That’s the one about sensuality and liberation. It smells a bit like a summer holiday in a bottle.”
Her fashion contacts of course came in handy when it came to finding retailers, with the likes of British department store Selfridges, Canada’s Ssense and Saks in the US all signing up straight off the bat.
This week, Vyrao launches into Mecca stores across Australia.
Whether or not you are a believer in the motivations behind the scents and their ability to shift energy, Sewell says: “I knew people would love the fragrances, I spent almost a year testing on people. But I didn’t think people would pick up on the healing aspect.”
But she is delighted to report that people have responded beyond her imagination.
“On a daily basis we have people messaging us on our Instagram saying how they’re feeling.
“Someone (was) going through a breakup, saying, ‘I feel my heart healing’. So many moments of that, it’s been incredible.”
Vyrao has already expanded into incense and candles, with other categories “that aren’t scent but are healing” coming soon, including ingestibles.
“The power between our thoughts and our emotions and our physical body is so huge,” she says.
“Anything that we can create that’s about healing, shifting the way that you feel, altering your energy, and raising your energetic fields … we can channel that into quite a few products in the same beauty world.”
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