Binaurale Welcomes Fragrance Consumers Into An Imaginative Y2K-Inspired World

When Binaurale co-founder Arielle Elfassy created briefs for the brand’s inaugural scents, she focused on building worlds inspired by music, emotion and imagery rather than target audiences or key ingredients.

“With lifestyle brands, fashion brands, even home cleaning products, all of these industries have taken a funkier approach, and we wanted to do that for fragrance while keeping the product itself very good and working with some of the best perfumers that I always wanted to work with,” says Elfassy, who developed Binaurale with her husband Jack Roizental. “We wanted to make the world of let’s call it niche perfumery something that a younger person would be able to approach.”

Binaurale launched at the end of last year with four scents priced at $167 each and concocted by fragrance materials company Robertet perfumers Clément Marx and Jérôme Epinette, who’s known for working with Byredo. Handled by Epinette, the brand’s early bestseller Supersolid is set in a world characterized by a desolate winter forest. Its visuals incorporate twinkling icicles, and it’s nestled in a feeling of warm nostalgia. The scent is associated with the song “Floe” by composer Philip Glass and the crunch of walking on fresh snow. It has notes of mandarin, lavender and amber.

In the world of another scent, the rose-forward Happy Hardcore spearheaded by Marx, there’s a densely populated dance floor ruled by a DJ. Visuals that encapsulate it include strobe lights, and it radiates an energetic feeling. The 1990s-era techno classic “Forever Young” by Interactive is a part of its soundtrack. In addition to Happy Hardcore, Marx concocted the fragrances Incident Light and Petal Jus for Binaurale. Incident Light is a citrus fragrance with notes of bergamot, orange zest and cashmere, and Petal Jus is a floral scent with notes of peony and musk.

Binaurale’s brand name—a term referring to the involvement of two ears—hints at its world building. Explaining the choice, Elfassy says, “All of your senses, aka your personal world and how you experience it, lie between your ears.”

Elfassy formerly held positions at Net-a-Porter and Givaudan. Roizental, a designer, was formerly at Pentagram. Long obsessed with fragrance, Elfassy took fragrance formulation classes in New York and France that ultimately led to her landing a job at Givaudan. She was a sales administrator at the company for almost a year when Roizental was in a senior designer role at Pentagram in New York before the pair returned to Miami, where they’re both from.

“Jack and I were trying to figure out a way that we would work together on something, and fragrance is something that we really wanted to continue in Miami, which doesn’t have an industry, but I think is a place of such great inspiration,” says Elfassy. “So, we started it here.”

Elfassy guides product development, and Roizental is in charge of branding. Binaurale is steeped in a Y2K aesthetic that Roizental describes as a “colorful explosion” of rave-esque blob graphics. Binaurale’s fragrances have globe-shaped caps that are blobby rather than perfect spheres. They’re from French component supplier TNT Group.

“Cycles tend to repeat themselves, and I thought it could be interesting to take some inspiration from those Y2K styles and mix it into something new, something ours, in a way that’s not to cliche,” says Roizental. Elfassy chimes in,“Y2K felt at the time that we were entering into a new world.”

Gen Z consumers, a group that’s been central to fragrance sales of late, constitute the heart of Binaurale’s audience so far. Elfassy and Roizental acknowledge that the brand is still finding its footing on social media as it attempts to communicate with them. Instagram is the pair’s social media platform of choice, and they plan to dive deeper into TikTok in the future.

Binaurale is interested in eventually opening its own store in Miami. At the moment, however, securing relationships with retailers where people can smell the fragrances is an important strategy for the brand. It’s concentrating on boutiques at the moment and has tapped sales agency Golden Meteors to help it get into them. Binaurale is available at the stores and e-tailers Arielle Shoshana, Equipment, Now or Never, Scent Split, Stéle, The Silver Room and Goodhood.

Roizental says, “It’s such a young brand, we want to see the response before committing to anything that’s a department store.”

Elfassy and Roizental tease that candles, a second batch of fragrances and travel-size versions of the existing fragrances are on the way. Roizental says, “But not a regular travel size, it has to be designed in a very Binaurale way.”