EAU DE PARFUM BY CEYLON
Ceylon CEO Patrick Boateng II discusses the worst skincare ingredients for people with melanin, scent memory, retinoid overuse and the playlist behind the company's new fragrance.
Welcome to the third edition of Scent + Song, an interview series by Vivian Medithi about perfume and music. Smell and sound are intimately tied to memory, and to each other; fragrances have "notes" and scentmakers work at perfume organs. A great perfume is like music you love: not something you know, but something you feel -- and we all feel a little differently. Today we’re speaking with Patrick Boateng II, CEO and founder of Ceylon, a skincare brand focused on men of color and people with melanated skin. Ceylon recently launched their first perfume, with another fragrance in the works; they gifted me two 8ml atomizers (total value: $80). Patrick and I hopped on a call to discuss scent memory, melanotoxic acne treatments, retinoid tachyphylaxis, how a perfume gets made, and the playlist that guided the creation of Ceylon Eau de Parfum.
What’s one of your first favorite perfumes or scent memories?
My earliest memory would be my parents, their personal care products. You go into the bathroom, you go into their room and there's always the scent. My mom used to use -- I don’t know if she still does -- Issey Miyake, I forget which one. We were recently traveling in Thailand, and she came to visit me while I was over there. Issey Miyake had something at some mall and I remember being like, “Oh, you like that.” But that was me talking about a memory of easily 25 years ago.
And then my dad used Jean Paul Gaultier, the one that’s like a torso with the stripes on it. And there’s a certain part of me that remembers the actual form of the packaging, the bottle form, as iconic, moreso than the scent itself. That's part of a lot of marketing. You see so many shapes and different designs, and people try to have something that captures [the scent]. I feel like a lot of the newer brands, ours included, don't care so much about having an iconic shape you know, it's expensive. But the scent really has to -- you're defined by the scent, less so the packaging it comes in.
Before you moved into perfume with Ceylon, what kind of fragrances were you wearing?
I really loved Blue Encens by Comme des Garçon. That was a good one, I loved it. I was also wearing French Lover [FKA Bois d’Orage] by Frederic Malle.
Another one that I really was coming back to is actually this very niche fragrance. I can't remember the name of it, but it's this old school style fragrance. Just a lavender vetiver fragrance and it's the cheapest thing I ever got, it's like 10 bucks. But I get it at this small fragrance store at Gurnee Plaza in Georgetown, which is in Penang, Malaysia. This thing comes in a green bottle, it’s massive but it’s 10 dollars and it's such a nice fragrance.
It turns out, when I was talking with our perfumer about fragrances, she was like, “Oh, lavender-vetiver is a very classic combination.” I was like, “Yeah, this thing always hits for me.” Any time I happen to find myself in Penang, I get a bottle, and I go down there whenever I'm in the region -- If I'm in Bangkok, if I'm in Ho Chi Minh, if I'm in Taiwan, wherever, I try to get down to Malaysia because I love it. Cool country, lots going on, interesting people, amazing incredible food. So I run out there and make sure to grab that fragrance.
What are some of the primary skincare concerns for people with melanated skin and where do you see the gap in terms of the beauty industry being able to service that demo?
Most of the science behind dermatology is still built on the skin of white men. When we're looking at people with pigmented skin, regardless of how light or dark you are -- it used to be they would say, “Well, there's this Fitzpatrick Scale that says your skin is all the way down on one side,” or all the way up on one side. But the truth is, melanin exists in your skin regardless of how light it is.
Often when we’re dealing with issues, we’re always thinking about “how do we get the symptoms of a condition to go away?” We’re surrounded by solutions that are not really solutions. If I have pain in my foot, I take aspirin, right? Does aspirin actually answer the question of why I'm having pain in my foot or does it just simply get rid of the pain? Right. So that was the framework under which a lot of dermatology and therefore a lot of skin care and cosmetics were built with that mindset.
In skin of color, which is what our scientific advisor Dr. Lynn McKinley-Grant [researches] -- and she’s one of the biggest researchers -- it’s talking about how to attack the common problems that are disproportionately affecting people of color. Issues around pigmentation and acne scarring, the prevalence of acne, the prevalence and overdiagnosis of eczema, issues around scarring, keloiding, things like that. The brand was meant to lean into that science.
There are anti-acne products where you put it on, you wake up [and] your pillow is bleached because what you're trying to do is bleach away the problem. But it doesn't actually say why am I having acne: is it my diet, is it hormones, is it sleep -- what is really going on. On the product side you can only do so much, but the goal was to create the type of products that give the skin the ability to one, heal itself and two, not allow for these [methods] that are resulting in acne, resulting in scars, resulting in a lot of these pigmentation issues. How do we help them help the skin clear those up and not have them come back.
That was really the basis behind developing Ceylon, harnessing the steps of the skincare routine to give the skin tools to do what it naturally wants to do, but you have those extra percentages of effectiveness as opposed to doing nothing.
What are two or three active ingredients in the skincare industry that you would say are the worst for people with melanated skin?
I'm not one of these people that's gonna run around like these companies that tell you, “We've got a naughty list of 400 ingredients we don't use.” And everybody in that natural/organic world -- to me, it screams low-performance. I deal in the world of high-performance skincare, and high-performance means we're willing to go into a lab or harness natural ingredients. We're willing to do what it takes to deliver the result safely and effectively.
In that world of high-performance skincare, the ingredients that I think would be particularly problematic -- benzoyl peroxide. It's a bleaching agent very commonly used to treat signs of acne. It's in certain very popular products that are marketed on TV, marketed over the counter, benzoyl peroxide. Unfortunately, that's a bleaching agent. If we struggle with acne, we're not supposed to be bleaching it away. We need to figure out, “okay, what is really happening here? What is the actual diagnosis?”
[AHAs can be] problematic. Not every ingredient in this overall group -- we use alpha hydroxy acids (AHAs) in our product -- but some of these products, things like kojic acid, mandelic acid [which inhibits the melanin-producing enzyme tyrosinase, similar to glycolic and lactic acid]… A lot of young brands are pushing these types of ingredients in their product and the truth is, these are bleaching agents. Often what happens is that you see people hawking these [as well as] glutathione, again bleach. Tranexamic acid is another one.
So tranexamic acid, glutathione, kojic acid, these are the ingredients that scream “Okay, we’re off track.” And a lot of brands that are marketed to people like us, they have these ingredients, but they’re packaged in the fun way. It's like, “this is bleaching cream.” Let's really get real about it: these are bleaching creams. Same as benzoyl peroxide, it's a bleaching agent.
The job is not to bleach the skin. Can you build a successful business off of bleaching products? Absolutely. That's what many international companies have done on the backs of people that look like us -- they've built multibillion dollar enterprises selling you bleach.
I saw in one of your previous interviews that you mentioned retinoids as problematic as well.
Retinoids are overmarketed to young consumers. And when I say young consumers, I really mean people in their late 20s and 30s, [even] in their 40s using retinoids.
I get it, people want to have smooth skin. And maybe you've exhausted or think you've exhausted the options you have for creating the framework to have smoother skin. But to me, retinoids, Retin-A, all these things, you see people who are just a bit too young using them to fight evidence of photoaging. And what happens is the body continues to adjust. And so with that adjustment, you need stronger and stronger and stronger retinoids. You go from retinol to Retin-A to high concentrations. And then eventually what, right?
It's a very intense thing to do to your skin to achieve a certain look. So for me, it's more about not going so hard on finding a chemical solution to a perceived problem. We all age, we're all going to get old. We all will start to show signs of photoaging. It’s okay.
And it's not that smooth skin is any evidence of great health. It can be, but when we're using things like retinol and all these ingredients to try to get this perfect, glasslike complexion, are we on the right track? I would say no.
When we met four and a half years ago, Ceylon had the cleanser, the toner and the facial moisturizer. Now you’ve branched out: bodywash, body moisturizer, a bunch of other things. In some interviews you had mentioned working on sunscreen; why a fragrance, and why now?
Fragrance was an interesting opportunity to me because I wanted to be able to talk to our person in a different way. Skincare is always going to be, what problem are you trying to solve or what issue are you trying to help people find a solution to? What are you trying to alleviate, and so in that way, it's very mechanical. It doesn't matter what it looks like, it doesn't matter what it feels like -- can it solve that problem? That's always the question with skincare.
The question I had was how can we move beyond the category of saying “Yeah, we just solve this problem. We solve these issues for you, prevent you from having these issues,” and how can we talk to people in a more proactive way, how can we share a bigger aspect of the creative vision that continues to develop?
The most legible form was fragrance, because fragrance is something where no one can really say, “Hey, it should smell like this.” It's trying to synthesize a lot of larger, more abstract ideas about who the brand is, who the brand is talking to. I could say, “Here's a T-shirt, it’s got this great design on it and here you go.” But as a brand that's in skincare, it felt like we have license to expand into [these] categories. They tend to live in the same place, from a retail perspective. The same place you buy your skincare is often the same place, you can buy your fragrance. Often there are these overlaps in these worlds, and there are many brands that do fragrance that have moved into skincare and body care.
I thought, “Well, why not us?” We have our own unique voice, our own unique vision, let's put this forward and see what we can do. Let's try to develop an idea and see if we're successful in encapsulating all those different aspects that make Ceylon unique and make it even possible, and then bring that to the world.
Once you decided to do a fragrance, what was on your moodboard? What were you inspired by and what were you aiming towards with the finished product?
We're mainly inspired by our customers, the different types of people, the different experiences they were coming from, myself included. There are a lot of really interesting scents that I'd brought to our perfumer: things that I liked, things that I didn't like, things that I was like, “I don't like this personally, but I understand that this is probably something that someone in our community likes,” and, you know, references.
Something that I understand is, it’s really about this more complex vision when you want to make something. You don't just put in the things you like. You have to look at the things you aren't necessarily excited about, because you understand that you can't leave any stone unturned, but also, your perspective is not the only one. So that really informed the process a lot. It was really trying to mix these different influences, but then there's a certain feeling that you're trying to kind of capture, right? You're trying to capture all of these ideas that undergird Ceylon. There's a marriage of the East and the West, the old, and the new, the scientific and the natural. These different elements that come together, the unfamiliar and the unexpected as well as some of the more subtle, but very familiar things that we can experience in fragrance and in scent.
Because that's who our guy is. Our guy is someone who, maybe on first glance you think you know who he is. Ask them a couple questions -- okay, the story is a bit different. Ask a few more questions, the story’s even more different. You dig and you get all these unexpected things that come together in a coherent form and yet you yourself could not even imagine.
Eau de Parfum by Ceylon
The Scent: Ceylon Eau de Parfum is a scent that announces itself immediately, vibrantly green and spicy -- but not pungent or sharp. Top notes of galbanum and artemesia (green) as well as coriander and timur pepper (spicy) remain potent even in the drydown; this perfume evolves not via subtraction, but by blossoming. Sweet, earthy, herbaceous -- black tea, frankincense, leather, vanilla, musk -- these elements help to round off the fragrance, and the melange of basenotes (patchouli, amber and cedar are also in there) is a refreshing throwback to an era before soliflores were all the rage. There’s something very citrusy and nearly medicinal about this scent as well -- I was unsurprised to spy citranellol, geraniol and limonene on the ingredient list -- as well as linalool, commonly associated with the fragrance of French lavender.
If you like Wonderwood by Commes Des Garçons, Synthetic Jungle by Frederic Malle, or Under the Lemon Trees by Maison Margiela REPLICA, this could make a nice addition to your fragrance wardrobe. This is a long lasting perfume that smells nearly the same six hours later as it does five minutes post-spritz; in a pinch, I used a couple sprays to cover up the lingering stench of McDonald’s in the car. $40 for an 8ml atomizer is right around the middle of the pack for pricepoint, and I’d call it solid value for the money.
Walk me through the process from ideation to the product in people’s hands, the process of making the fragrance.
Fragrance making is not unlike anything where you do need a technique, you need technical assistance. You can try to make your own, you can try to mix oils, but for us, we knew we needed to go to an expert. So in the process, once we recruited our nose to help on the project, essentially it was sitting down with a lot of different ideas. Vision boards, a lot of different fragrances, a lot of different forms of inspiration, to begin to develop the core idea behind what we wanted to say with this fragrance.
From there it really was about giving the perfumer time to digest everything, and then to come up with a set of directions. We had three original directions that we could go with the fragrance based on the different ideas and concepts that came together because those actually inform the types of materials we are going to use. So there are a few months where literally we're just smelling materials. You don't even have anything. You just talk and you smell.
The idea is that there are these olfactive elements that make reference to the ideas, the memories, a lot of the things that we're trying to capture. So what we're trying to do is find the elements that begin to piece together, that become the building blocks of that concrete idea that we want to do. Once we settle on what’s still a fairly wide range of materials, then we get our core concepts.
So we've got three very distinct directions: what is the direction that we feel, in this early stage, will give the best platform to further explore? Once that's done, you pick your direction and then you're just bringing in a few more materials to kind of branch out and tell and piece together that right story. After that, we narrow it down again, have a few more directions and a few more branches, test out a few things.
Once we have a general idea of where we're going to land, from there, it's really just -- there’s minor differences in certain materials, we're pricing out how much it will cost. We're understanding packaging vessels to understand what we need to produce. There's this element of “what is the best way to get this fragrance out the door.” Not only do we have budget constraints, but we have retail and pricing and distribution and all these different things happening that inform how we're moving through the more technical side of it, which is the testing and the packaging and really making sure that we're hitting all these marks, while the creative side is free to flourish and finish the job of telling that story.
Then once we confirm everything, you go get the oil made and then it gets sent to the supplier, the filler, and then you get your finished product after -- the whole process took us 18 to 20 months from sort of like idea and concept to launch product, so quite a long time. But I think that the result was really worth it and while we're still working through getting to the market and still trying to seed it and get people out here using it, I think we came up with something that is sufficiently unique and unlike what a lot of people have experienced in the market. And that ties itself back to the way in which we develop as opposed to maybe certain other companies that might have a very different process, especially some of the bigger ones.
You mentioned that music was a big part of the inspiration for this perfume.
Music is a great way for me to tap into this psychological space where you can feel a lot of creativity. I'm someone who grew up playing music, obviously [I] listen to a lot of music, but there's something about sound that helps channel certain ideas.
So there always was an idea that music would be a heavily influential part of the process, because “our guy” was someone who was coming to the world having eclectic taste -- not just in fashion, but in music and art, right? And music is one of the most legible forms of art, moreso than visual art, mainly because music has probably existed for humans longer than representation in a visual form has.
Is smell art? Yes it can be, absolutely. But for people [in general], you can probably construct the playlist that defines “you” better than any other thing. And that’s what helped create the framework to say, “Okay, you can use a playlist to put forward this idea.”
What was really interesting in the development was that there was a “before” playlist that went into the process and then after having it and smelling it, there's an “after” playlist. Having those two aspects, created an interesting feeling and interesting framework around how this work is being conducted.
What was on those playlists, the before and after?
So the first playlist was actually the playlist that I made for. We used to have a thing, City Boy Radio, basically just us having these playlists made by myself or people who did work for us or people in our community. So we’d just go and say “go ahead and make this playlist and just give us a vibe.” And for the one I wanted, I was thinking [of] myself and songs I love most, thinking about songs that I felt touched on what we think about thematically, songs that just touched on who we thought our person was emotionally. The end playlist, after [we made the scent had] similar themes. But it was more clear in some ways.
The first playlist was put together, but it almost felt like the themes were not so clear. Cool, it’s a little niche, got some popular stuff, [that kind of guy]. When the fragrance came out, there was this way of saying, “I have a stronger understanding of how warmth, and how freshness, and how these leather notes come through in certain types of music and certain songs. I understand how certain voices, certain feelings [come through].” If I think about ¿Téo?, there’s this quiet confidence in the way he sings and the way he brings himself forward.
I love this song “haven’t haven’t” from Jonah Yano. He does the album [portrait of a dog] with BADBADNOTGOOD, and it's done in like a weekend. Where he like, goes through this breakup and then he just runs up to Canada and knocks this album out and it's just full of emotion, family and all this. But it's really sincere and honest.
Jordan Ward [and] Lido, “PRICETAG/BEVERLYWOOD.” That's a song where it has a lot of character to it, because Ward always has this kind of stop-start. A lot of this glitching, and Jordan's voice really captures a lot of the really interesting elements of this hook and [how the song has] this like, syrupy sweetness to it almost.
And there's that sweetness in the form, but that also is a song about wrestling with, going up and going down in LA as a singer. And trying to deal with this anxiety, but [also] the confidence to say “This is me before and here's me today.”
These are the types of songs that represent our guy. They're open. They feel. Even the opening one, “A Song About The Sun.” It's opening, it's this exposure, this brightness. And then the song has this spicy rock element to it, which is what we have in the beginning [of the perfume]. The first note, that timur pepper that jumps forward, the coriander.
Once we had these elements and had these essences of the scent, it was like “Oh. Of course. This is the song.” You're not going, “Uhhh I think it should be…” because you have nothing, [because] when you finally have something, you can actually match the scent to the ear and the way it feels, and connect what you think is happening in your mind with what is happening both in the lyrics but [also] in the feeling of the song, the elements of it, how it comes together, and even the artist who's doing the song, who that person is and who that person feels like through the song.
So it's almost backwards. You want to make a playlist to try to influence it, but in a way, you're simply doing a draft and then when the final comes out, you're like “Ah, all the edits are here, this is actually what it's like.”
We've got two more [fragrances] in development. The second one has a playlist which is very different than this. And I suspect that, when that [scent] comes out, the playlist to respond to what actually happened, the postscript, will again be another one.
I was surprised -- it’s not only good, which is in and of itself an accomplishment, but I was really impressed with just how different it actually feels. I've tried a decent amount of fragrances at this point; usually perfumes feel like they fit [squarely] in this family or that family. Ceylon EDP, there’s the really herbal, green woodiness, but the way that’s tempered down with the spice elements is really [unique and] good. To be fair, my little sister, I had her smell it and she was not a fan, but I am so -- it’s personal.
Fragrance is cool because you get a very quick understanding of what is happening [even if] the dry down changes over time. I really appreciate the kind words and understanding our vision. It's nice to see that there's an element of this person captured in that. There's all these different things that are coming forward. It's that complexity that you have to wrestle with.
I like that it's not something that everyone finds pleasant. The goal is not to be pleasant. The goal is not to be liked by everyone. The goal is to be, and then live with that. It's helpful that there are people who sometimes say, “nope.” Just like people who you meet can be like “I'm not interested.”
The second fragrance [we’re currently working on] is actually an even more intense attempt at capturing this person, but the internal side of this person. Now it's about, “what is this person like on the inside?” And how do we wrestle and [what do we] do with a lot of things that happen inside of us? So it's a study, and even a test, in how we can do fragrance that has a lot of emotion. Like an idea, incredibly intense, that's really what it's about. It's not even about the person anymore, it's about the ideas, the thoughts and the emotions that comprise the person. How do you have something that is so intense and so big, but just like an idea, just like an emotion, just like the soul, it's very sheer. And so we're exploring what that means through fragrance and through scent.
Vivian’s Pairing: Ceylon Eau de Parfum and “15 Step” by Radiohead
“‘15 Steps’ was born out of a mad rhythm experiment that we did last year,” Thom Yorke explained in 2006. “At first we thought, ‘How the fuck can we pull this off live?’”
“15 Step” uses a 5/4 time signature, spinning up instantaneous momentum, drums tumbling headlong into Thom Yorke’s strained melody: “How come I end up where I have started? How come I end up where I went wrong?” Not to gloss over those tachycardic drums and their cunning rhythms; as guitarist Ed O’Brien notes, “In the West, we’re not very rhythm-savvy. Anything not in 4/4 is hard for a lot of people [to clap along to].”
What I’m really interested in is 40 seconds into the song, guitar splashing over the precipice, that instant of impact when a wave breaks. It’s calm in the way elite athletes are calm on the pitch -- a strength that is not circumstantial, but self-contained.
Those drums are the spice of Eau de Parfum, the coriander and timur pepper. And the guitar: that’s vanilla and patchouli, that little smoky frankincense. But it’s the cement and the black tea and amber gluing it all together, that little gurgle of saffron in the back -- and that’s the bass, silent for more than half the song, ducking in and out of view like a deer between trees.
When we're talking about the next perfume that Ceylon is working on. Would you say it's in a similar scent direction?
It’s still pretty early, but if anything, I would just say it's challenging. The intention for the second scent -- it's not meant to draw you in.
Emotions are challenging, ideas are challenging, the soul is challenging to deal with. Most people can't even sit with themselves in this life, and the fragrance, it's really meant to force you to sit in something that isn't always going to feel good. Is that a good commercial thing? I don't know. But the idea is that this is what we want to explore, how do you deal with these challenging aspects of our lives and our internal lives and how can we encapsulate that in fragrance form. So it's not going to smell bad -- it'll still smell incredible. It'll just be one of those ones where it cuts into a deeper niche. You can think of it as shadow work through fragrance. I don't think a lot of people will want to open that door, but the people that do will definitely be rewarded.