Imaginary Authors: Portland's Self-Taught Perfumer Who Builds Each Scent Around a Fictional Book

In 2010, Josh Meyer quit his job and went downstairs. Not to a studio, not to a lab with a mentor — to his basement in Portland, Oregon, where he started teaching himself to blend perfume by working through the materials one by one. Two years later, in 2012, Imaginary Authors launched publicly. By the time the Beautytap founder spotlight ran in July 2025, Meyer and co-founder Ashod Simonian had been at it for fourteen years without any obvious signs of slowing down.

That origin matters because it explains a lot about what Imaginary Authors actually smells like. Meyer describes his process as puzzle-solving: finding components that produce something larger than their individual parts. There’s no mention of formal training, no apprenticeship under a Grasse legend, no house style inherited from a perfumery school. What you get instead is a self-invented sensibility that leans toward the unusual — combinations that sound like they shouldn’t work on paper and then, fairly often, do.

What Ashod Simonian Actually Does

Co-founder Ashod Simonian isn’t a silent business partner — he’s the visual and creative half of the operation. Every fragrance gets illustrated packaging that Simonian creates himself. The artwork isn’t decorative afterthought; it’s how each scent’s fictional narrative gets made legible. If Meyer’s job is to get a story into a bottle, Simonian’s job is to get the same story onto the box, and the two functions are meant to reinforce each other. The brand’s name makes more sense once you understand this: each fragrance is framed as a book written by an author who doesn’t exist. Simonian’s illustrations are the cover art for those imaginary books.

This also means Imaginary Authors is genuinely a two-person creative operation at its center, not a solo perfumer with a hired designer. The founders describe their influences as covering food, drink, travel, books, television, music, and memory — which is a deliberately wide aperture, and you can hear it in the range of their catalog.

The Fragrances: What They Actually Smell Like

The four confirmed best-sellers give a reasonable cross-section of what Meyer reaches for.

Cape Heartache pairs pine with strawberry — a combination that sounds like a novelty candle but lands, by most accounts, as something genuinely unsettling and atmospheric. Pine is a resinous, slightly medicinal material; strawberry reads as sweet and bright; the tension between them is the point.

Saint Julep runs on sweet mint, magnolia, and bourbon. It’s the house’s most approachable bet for anyone who wants something that smells recognizably like a classic southern cocktail but with floral complexity underneath.

In Love with Everything lists raspberry, coconut palm sugar, and — this is the actual listed note — stardust. Meyer is not above a little whimsy in his note lists, which is consistent with the literary-fiction frame the brand runs on.

A Whiff of Waffle Cone is a gourmand built around vanilla, salted caramel, and cinnamon, made as a collaboration with Portland’s Salt & Straw ice cream. That collaboration is a good example of how Imaginary Authors operates: locally embedded, food-adjacent, not trying to make something austere.

None of these is a conventional “niche prestige” fragrance. There’s no oud, no iso e super-forward woody amber, no attempt to position the house somewhere between Amouage and Serge Lutens. The references are more pop-cultural and specifically American — which is either a point in the brand’s favor or not, depending on what you’re looking for.

The full catalog is available as a Complete Works Sample Collection, which is the practical way to move through the library without committing to full bottles.

What the “Fictional Book” Frame Actually Gets You

The concept of each fragrance being scored to a book by an imaginary author could easily be pure marketing decoration. In practice it seems to do two things. First, it gives Meyer a narrative brief to work from — a genre, a setting, a mood — rather than starting from a raw brief or a trend report. Second, it gives buyers a way into fragrances that don’t obviously fit established categories. If a scent is described as a Pacific Northwest gothic novel, “pine plus strawberry” stops being a weird gourmand and starts being an environment. Whether that’s useful to you or just clever copy depends on how you approach fragrance in the first place.

How to Actually Get It

Imaginary Authors sells direct through imaginaryauthors.com, which is the most reliable path to the full catalog. The brand is also listed on Amazon for some titles — Cape Heartache and A Whiff of Waffle Cone are among the names that appear there — though the direct site is where you’ll find the complete sample sets and any limited or newer releases.

Sampling first is the right move here. The house’s range is wide enough that some fragrances will land and others won’t, and the Complete Works sample set exists precisely for this reason. It’s not a cheap hobby, but you’re paying for real creative labor from a two-person operation that has been doing this on its own terms for over a decade.

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If you’re mapping out where a house like this sits relative to the broader indie scene, our guide to independent and niche fragrance houses covers the landscape in more depth.