Scent Bytes’ first featured house is here!

Discovering Buchart Colbert

This season, our magazine turns the spotlight to Buchart Colbert, a Tucson-based perfume house founded in 2024 by Sean Colbert, a classically trained musician, and Sean Cavenaugh, a brand architect. Music lies at the foundation of their approach to perfumery. Every fragrance is shaped by contrast, harmony, dissonance, and melody, just like a composition. Sean begins each project with a brief rooted in musical inspiration and personal experience, while Sean expands the vision to include themes of empowerment, transformation, and self-discovery.

This cycle, our clients were introduced to Knife Thrower, Lutin Errant (a house favorite), and L’Hantise. Some bottles have already found homes within our community, and more members will soon have the chance to experience them. Their iterative process gives every note a role in shaping character and story, often weaving ambers, woods, and light florals into textured unisex blends with their distinctive practice of “stacking” ingredients.

For me, this house struck a deeply personal chord. Living with synesthesia, I was profoundly moved by the experience of listening to the music while smelling the scent and knowing the story behind it. With Lutin Errant, I shed a tear. I could see ripples in water from the music notes and could feel textures from the smell. It was an honor to experience fragrance in this way, and it was this very moment that inspired our first, and the world’s first, olfactory art in motion performance.

Buchart Colbert is honored with a three-page spread (excluding photos) in our members-only quarterly archive and will close our VIP multi-sensory living art show at a luxury venue.

I also want to thank Buchart Colbert, and every house we’ve worked with, for sharing their art with me. Perfume is not “just smelly water.” It is time, effort, money, passion, and soul distilled into a bottle. For that, I feel truly honored to work with Buchart Colbert and all of our houses.