St. Clair Scents: The Vermont Dairy Farmer Turned Perfumer

Before she made perfume, Diane St. Clair made butter — the kind chefs fight over. For more than a decade, her small creamery in Orwell, Vermont supplied Thomas Keller’s restaurants, including the French Laundry, with cultured butter made from eight cows on a farm she and her husband ran themselves. She holds a Master’s of Public Health from Columbia and spent years working in health departments in New York City and Vermont before any of that. In 2018, while still running the dairy full-time, she started a second business: an artisan perfume house.

She sold the farm in 2022 and kept the perfume line. It’s called St. Clair Scents, and it isn’t a retirement hobby — four of her fragrances have been finalists at the Art and Olfaction Awards, the closest thing independent perfumery has to a juried film festival.

What she actually makes

St. Clair writes her own formulas and mixes them herself, in small batches, in Vermont, with no perfumer-for-hire, no outsourced production, and no distributor. The fragrances lean into concept over crowd-pleasing: 2019 brought Gardener’s Glove (an Art and Olfaction finalist that year), 2020 brought Eve (another finalist), and 2022 brought Moving On, her response to pandemic isolation.

Her most pointed work is more recent. In 2025 she released Armor and Sanctuary, a pair of fragrances built around the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, drawing directly on Barbara Kruger’s 1989 artwork Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground) and on Gisèle Pelicot’s decision to make her own abuse trial public rather than private. Armor opens fruity and metallic — grape-like top notes over burnished saffron — before settling into something earthier and resinous. Sanctuary layers pollen-like mimosa and cassie against overripe fruit, galbanum, and incense; Cafleurebon called the effect “jolie-laide,” pretty and unsettling at once. Neither fragrance is subtle about what it’s arguing. Most indie perfume houses stick to nostalgia and nature. St. Clair uses her formulas to say something about the news.

Casablanca

Her first release, and still the one that shows up most in write-ups, is Casablanca (2018) — not a movie tie-in so much as a scent built around the idea of Morocco: citrus groves, humid night air, something dark underneath the flowers.

It’s built as a floral chypre that drifts oriental as it dries down — the citrus and white flowers up top are conventional enough, but hyraceum and civet in the base push it into animalic territory most designer florals never go near. Cafleurebon and Kafkaesque both reviewed it at launch and landed on the same read: pretty for the first twenty minutes, then considerably stranger.

Where to actually get it

Here’s the catch: St. Clair Scents doesn’t sell through Amazon, and right now nothing on stclairscents.com is in stock — Casablanca, Gardener’s Glove, and the Audacious Innocence pair (Eve and Pandora) are all listed as pre-order only. That’s the reality of a one-person operation making everything by hand in small batches; drops sell out and restocks take time. If you want the real thing, the brand’s own site is the only place to check.

If you don’t want to wait, a couple of Amazon-buyable fragrances land in a similar register.

D.S. & Durga Mississippi Medicine

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Shares St. Clair’s instinct for building a scent around a specific, researched place rather than a mood board — pine resin, cypress, and smoky birch tar instead of Morocco, but the same seriousness.

Aesop Hwyl

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A gentler match: smoky vetiver and restrained woods from a niche house that also refuses to make an easy crowd-pleaser.

For more on how houses like this differ from the DTC dupe brands that dominate a lot of fragrance shopping, our guide to niche fragrance houses has the wider picture.