What If Your Perfume Could Regulate Your Nervous System?

The story of a wedding in the Pyrenees, a horse named Hazelnut, and a baguette.

Sometimes, in all the commitments of running this newsletter, the stories I most want to tell get pushed to the bottom of the pile. So, I thought I’d create a new space for them, one where I can give myself the freedom to delve into one thing I think is really special. That vertical begins today, and we’re going to call it “Something to Love”.

Most people think of scent as surface-level: something worn, not felt. But anyone who’s ever had a smell undo them — snap them back to a childhood kitchen, a dearly departed family member, the innards of an attic — knows it isn’t merely decorative, it’s somatic—triggering, even! It enters through the limbic system, bypasses language, and lands straight in the archive. You don’t remember it, your body does.

I’ve been getting to know Brianna Lipovsky, founder of Maison d’Etto, and it’s clear she gives deep, deliberate thought to what she puts into the world. I’ve written before about my affection for her scent, Canaan — all dry grasses and heat shimmer — and her Verdades candle, which smells like truth cracked open when I burn it in my living room. But it was a passing anecdote about equine therapy that stayed with me. Something in the way she described it (the unspoken mirroring, the nervous system honesty) made me realize: her fragrances are radical because they’re regulatory. They cohere. They stabilize.

Maison d’Etto is often described as equestrian-inspired, but that undersells it. Yes, these are fragrances with hooves in the dirt and a pulse you can match your breath to. But they don’t wear you, they walk with you. They’re complex, I’d even venture to say challenging. And like many scents with natural oils, they morph: Canann smells like an entirely different thing dried down on my skin than it does on my fiancé’s.

At its heart, Maison d’Etto’s Noisette is a scent about somatic trust; the kind you build with an animal that doesn’t speak your language but understands your nervous system better than you do. Rooted in both neuroscience and nostalgia, it’s designed to soothe the nervous system and stir something deeper within the body: a memory, a place, a nervous system returning to calm. It’s emblematic of what horses do in equine therapy: they co-regulate and attune. They offer a kind of emotional mirroring that bypasses the thinking brain and speaks directly to the body. You can’t fake calm around a horse; they feel your dissonance. They don’t tolerate it. But they will walk you back to yourself.

At Noisette’s core is a lavender-derived molecule called Lavandin, which has been studied via fMRI technology and shown to activate the pons (the part of the brain associated with relaxation and emotional safety). While not clinically marketed as an anti-anxiety treatment, the mechanism of action is quietly progressive: it helps the brain remember how to exhale.

It’s lavender, but not the soapy kind; not sterile, not department-store spa. This is lavender with mountain heat in its roots and riverbed moss on its breath. Intimate, skin-warmed, and molecularly attuned to the softening of edges.

And then there’s the horse.

Noisette — French for “hazelnut” — was the name of a backyard horse Brianna rode once in the Pyrenees at her husband’s ex-girlfriend’s wedding. She was lured out of her paddock with a metal pail of stout and stale baguettes (so French), and ridden through sunburned hills and cool stone villages. That memory became the soul of the fragrance: the wild, the tender, the animal that knows the way back home.

“French people are always confused by the name,” Brianna says. “The scent has nothing to do with hazelnuts. But that’s the point. Noisette isn’t about what it sounds like. It’s about what it unlocks.”

“My fave combo is DS & Durga’s Wild Brooklyn Lavender lotion worn under Noisette,” she continues. “Because you get that sturdy gasoline note in the lotion.”

You smell it and you’re there: gliding through lavender that grows wild and unassuming along alpine streams. It becomes a kind of fragrant co-regulator. A wearable form of therapy. Less scent-as-accessory, more scent-as-companion. The heat rises from the cliffs, but the air shifts cooler as you descend toward something familiar, even if it’s somewhere you’ve never been… just a smell, a memory, and an unexpected return to center.