Serene B. Hollingsworth

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.

I have also published for most of my adult life. Through Bahiyah Woman, I explored the culture, faith, and leadership of Black women. Through Black Girlz, I supported the reading and writing development of Black girls in underrepresented schools throughout Chicago and across the country. The publications were different, but the conviction beneath them was the same: Black women and girls deserve authorship, intellectual space, and a record that does not depend upon someone else deciding we are worthy of one.

That history matters because SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS was not a departure from who I had been. It gathered who I had always been into one Maison.

I never built a career in Corporate America. I landed there, and I always knew the difference. I never dreamed of climbing a corporate ladder or breaking a glass ceiling. I worked to survive. I showed up, led, performed, endured, and did what so many Black women have done without ceremony or sufficient recognition. I survived Corporate America, but I never mistook survival for belonging.

While still there, I founded SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS in 2023 at 58 years old. What had lived within me for decades finally took form through faith, discipline, and the refusal to believe I had arrived too late. In November 2024, I LOVE MY LOCS became Volume I, the founding fragrance and first declaration of the Maison.

Then, in September 2025, Corporate America was done with me before I was done with it. I was pushed out alongside countless Black women during a season when spaces that had taken everything we offered decided, once again, that it was not enough. I will not dress that up or make it sound graceful simply because I survived it.

The Maison did not begin with that loss, but the loss changed what the Maison was required to carry. SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS had already been prepared for the moment I would need it most. What had begun as a long-held dream and an act of faith became the place where I could gather what remained and refuse to call it insufficient.

At 61, I stand as a Black perfumer, writer, artist, and founder building a Maison authored entirely through a Black woman’s lens. I understand the significance of that authorship and the responsibility it carries. I compose fragrances that hold what words alone cannot always contain: grief, joy, identity, survival, faith, the names of women who deserved more time, and the stories that have waited long enough to be told beautifully.

FRAGRANCE PERSPECTIVES is the natural progression of this work. The independent global fragrance journal moves beyond reviews and releases to examine fragrance through culture, history, luxury, identity, authorship, memory, and the institutions that determine whose knowledge is preserved. It asks the questions the industry too often leaves unasked and creates a record for conversations that might otherwise never happen.

The publication and the fragrance compositions are not separate identities. They are the same work expressed through different mediums. Through fragrance, I compose memory into presence. Through publishing, I document the people, ideas, and systems that determine what will be remembered. Both are acts of authorship. Both belong within SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS.

The visual art throughout the Maison extends that same conviction. Black women occupy the cosmos not as visitors, guests, or borrowed symbols of beauty, but as sovereign figures within it. These images are not decoration. They are belief made visible and a declaration that we have always belonged at the center of beauty, imagination, and luxury.

I share this because I want you to feel something when you enter SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS. I want you to understand that it is not too late, that what remains after loss can still be enough, and that the dream you have carried quietly deserves the dignity of being lived fully.

To my daughters and my grandchildren, this is for you. To anyone who has ever been told through silence, exclusion, or force that they do not belong, this is also for you.

And to my husband Mark, thank you. You held this with me when holding it was hard. None of this stands without you.

With reverence and with everything I have left,

Serene B. Hollingsworth
Perfumer, Writer, Artist & Founder
SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS, A Maison