When Shoemack set out to create a natural fragrance brand, she didn’t want to compromise. A winemaker by trade, she understood intrinsically that the best things—a bottle of wine, a signature scent—take time to get perfectly right. So, she started at the source, approaching specific notes with the same fastidiousness and care that she would a grape harvest.
But when the brand launched in 2013, the culture around natural fragrance, for the most part, hadn’t yet caught up to the rest of the perfume world in terms of performance or sophistication.
Enter: Biochemistry. It was an aspect of the business that Shoemack told us she came at “sideways,” but it quickly became the piece that set Abel apart in its field—and what has made it into the cult-favorite it has grown into over the last 12 years.
She partnered with chemist Isaac Sinclair and master perfumer Dr. Fanny Grau from the very beginning. Together, they created a range of scents built on notes that are renewable and biodegradable without compromise. The result? The trio found a way to derive specific notes without the use of fossil fuels, parabens, phthalates, and artificial dyes. Here, plant sugars are the starting point. They’re fermented, not unlike grapes after harvest, with live organisms to create scent molecules.
“Winemaking teaches you to read materials on their own terms, not yours,” she says. “Fermentation felt like familiar territory by the time I got to fragrance, so biotech never felt like a stretch—it felt like the same instinct applied somewhere new.”
