Scent for the soul

You could say that Yasmin Sewell has always been able to sniff out the next big thing. Now, she has bottled that instinct with her perfume brand Vyrao.
For more than two decades, Sewell was a shining star of the fashion industry, a buyer and creative consultant of global renown, who is credited, among other things, with spotting up-and-comers including Christopher Kane, Roksanda Ilincic and Jonathan Anderson. From her much-lauded London boutique Yasmin Cho in the Cool Britannia
1990s, it was a meteoric rise, working with cutting-edge boutique Browns in the mid 2000s, reinvigorating London’s legacy department store Liberty before pivoting into digital platforms including Farfetch and co-founding It-girl brand Être Cécile along the way. A signature personal style also made her a natural subject for the burgeoning street style photographers of the era.
But despite her successes, something was lacking.
“I spent years in fashion and beauty, surrounded
by incredible creativity, but I always felt there was a missing layer—the energetic, emotional side,” Sewell tells The Luxury Report. “What truly moves people comes from how something makes them feel, not just how it looks.”

Vyrao is her way of balancing these two worlds. More than mood-lifting aromatherapy, Sewell’s intention was to create perfumes that shift energy, introducing a wellness element into the luxury perfume realm. In this, she is once again ahead of the curve, pioneering a segment that has since attracted players like Charlotte Tilbury. Her vision earned backing from LVMH’s private equity arm L Catterton in 2024, following earlier seed funding from Estée Lauder Ventures.
Since launching in 2021 with five scents, including the potently named Witchy Woo (designed to promote courage and creativity), Sewell has been building a brand that is intended to do more than make you smell fabulous. “My vision was to create something deeply rooted in energy, emotion and connection. I wanted to build a world that went beyond just beautiful products, something that made people feel aligned, inspired and grounded in themselves.
“Vyrao works from the belief that everything holds energy—scent, emotions, colour, even the way something is made,” Sewell explains. “Each of our scents is designed to channel a specific energetic state, like courage, joy or self love. What’s fascinating is how this connects to neuroscience. Scent directly stimulates the limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotion and memory. So through fragrance, we can consciously shift how we feel.”
For Sewell, it is not merely about tapping into current trends towards wellness. In fact, she says that wellness was always at the forefront of her career in fashion. “I used it to help me be more intuitive and to guide all the decisions I made. I trained in reiki and many other holistic practices from my early 20s right through until I moved away from fashion and created Vyrao,” she shares. “It wasn’t so much a [career] pivot as a return to something that had always been within me.”
That interest in alternative therapies was sparked from her experiences as a self-described intuitive child growing up in Sydney, where she says she dreamt of things before they happened and even saw spirits. “I was born connected to it. As I got older, I wanted to understand [the unseen] more deeply. That exploration has always run alongside my creative life, and Vyrao is really the merging of those two worlds, energy and expression.”
Having that genuine belief is, she believes, where commerce and creativity can be harmonious bedfellows. “I’ve learned that if the intention is clear and true, they can coexist. It’s only when something is approached purely as a market opportunity that the balance is lost.

Our scents are tools designed to help people connect more deeply with themselves, to bring awareness into everyday life. When something is made with integrity, it carries an energy that supports people. That’s where the harmony lies.” You could say that all roads have led Sewell to this point. “Every chapter taught me something essential. Yasmin Cho taught me to trust my instincts completely. At Browns and Liberty, I learned how to balance creativity with commercial awareness, and how to curate with emotional intelligence. Etre Cécile taught me the power of community and brand building. All of these experiences shaped how I built Vyrao.”
Despite Sewell having the world’s best retailers on speed dial, at the beginning of the journey “it definitely took retailers with a pioneering vision” to stock the brand, she says. Today Vyrao is found in around 200 stores across 25 countries, including Mecca in Australia, which was one of those early
adopters, along with Liberty.

In October 2025, the brand launched its first physical space, a six-week pop-up in New York’s SoHo, an immersive multi-sensory experience that combined light, sound,
movement and architecture to reimagine how fragrance can be experienced. The popup followed the release of the brand’s latest two perfumes, Ludeaux and Ludatrix: the first a milky peach and jasmine scent that Sewell describes as “playful and flirtatious”; the latter its sexier cousin laced with latex and pepper, created to “capture the balance between feeling empowered and irresistibly attractive”. It is seeing the effect of her perfumes on people that drives Sewell every day. That, and laughing “on an hourly basis”, she says. This is the animating idea behind Vyrao: that fragrance, formulated with intention and backed by
neuroscience, can genuinely shift how you feel.