Serene B. Hollingsworth

 A MAISON COMPOSED IN TRUTH

To Those Who Enter the Maison,

I have loved fragrance my entire life. Long before I possessed the language of composition, I understood that fragrance was never simply adornment. It could preserve memory, announce presence, and return us to truths the world had tried to make invisible.

Writing became another way for me to preserve those truths. For most of my adult life, I have published work centered on the culture, faith, intellectual lives, and leadership of Black women. 

Through Bahiyah Woman, I explored the fullness of our lives in print. With Black Girlz, I supported the reading and writing development of Black girls in underrepresented schools across Chicago and beyond. Both emerged from the same conviction: Black women and girls deserve authorship, intellectual space, and narratives not dictated by others.

Before SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS existed, I was already doing the work that would become the Maison. I was preserving memory, asserting authorship, and creating space for our stories to be told with beauty, intelligence, and authority.

I also spent many years working in Corporate America. I never liked Corporate America, and it never particularly liked me. I did not build my identity there. I worked, led, founded companies while employed by others, and kept alive the vision that had been silenced first at the university level and later in the workplace.

The final six years of my employment produced some of the most consequential work of my professional life. They were also the most toxic. I learned what it means to be capable, productive, and powerful inside institutions that value your labor while resisting your voice.

In 2023, at 58 years old and still employed, I established SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS. The Maison did not begin because Corporate America ended. It began because the work had lived within me all my life and could no longer remain unnamed. In November 2024, I LOVE MY LOCS became Volume I, the founding fragrance and first declaration of the Maison.

On September 10, 2025, I was forced out of Corporate America during a period when hundreds of thousands of Black women were also being pushed from its workforce. That day did not create the vision. It became the turning point I needed to fully build what had survived years of redirection, silencing, and delay.

SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS was already waiting for me.

I do not believe that timing was accidental. This Maison is testimony to the sacrifice of YESHUA and to the grace, mercy, and favor of YHWH. My faith is not language placed around the work. It is the foundation beneath everything I have been able to compose, write, imagine, and build.

In March 2026, six months after I was forced out, The Wall Street Journal told part of this story in its national report on Black women leaving corporate America to build enterprises of their own. I was one of many women who refused to let the vision die inside institutions that never made room for it.

Now in my sixties, I stand as the writer, perfumer, artist, and founder behind SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS. I am the nose behind every composition. I author the stories, compose the parfums, and direct the visual language of the Maison. My hand, memory, faith, and point of view are present throughout the work.

My fragrance compositions carry what words alone cannot always contain: grief, joy, identity, survival, faith, the names of women who deserved more time, and stories that have waited too long to be told beautifully. Each Parfum Absolu is composed in small batches because intimacy, intention, and artistic integrity are essential to the work.

Black women remain the origin and center of this Maison, but they do not stand alone within it. The Black men whose lives are entwined with ours also belong within this inheritance. My father awakened my love of fragrance. My brothers are part of the family memory I carry. Their presence is intentional because, within this Maison, our stories live beside one another.

FRAGRANCE PERSPECTIVES emerged naturally from this authorship. The independent global fragrance journal moves beyond reviews and releases to examine fragrance through culture, history, identity, commerce, authorship, and memory. It asks the questions the industry often leaves untouched and creates a record of conversations that deserve to endure.

My fragrance compositions, publishing, and visual art are the same work expressed through different forms. Through fragrance, I compose memory into presence. Through publishing, I document the people, ideas, and systems that influence what will be remembered. Through art, I render Black women as sovereign figures at the center of beauty, imagination, and possibility.

The Maison continues to expand through literature, correspondence, adornment, and objects of legacy. Each form offers another way for a story to be worn, held, read, shared, and remembered. Fragrance remains at the heart of SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS, but my authorship has never been confined to the bottle.

I share this so that when you enter SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS, you understand what you are entering. This is the work of a Black woman who lived long enough to recognize that delay was not denial, displacement was not conclusion, and the vision others tried to silence still had a voice.

To my daughters and grandchildren, this is for you. To anyone who has ever been made to feel unwelcome through silence, exclusion, or someone else’s limited imagination, this is also for you.

And to my husband, Mark, thank you for believing in this vision, carrying its weight beside me, and remaining present when the journey was difficult. None of this would exist without your love and support.

With reverence,

Serene B. Hollingsworth
CEO, Perfumer, Writer, Artist, and Founder
Parfumeuse de Vérité
SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS, A Maison

Legacy Worn in Fragrance.