Profile
Cultus Artem
by Sandra Ballentine
Stepping inside perfumer and jewelry designer Holly Tupper’s world is like traveling somewhere you’ve always wanted to go but never knew existed. Cultus Artem, her cognoscenti-approved fragrance and skincare line, is one of the most luxurious brands in the clean beauty space, with low-impact "slow beauty" practices, strict safety protocols, gorgeous sustainable packaging and a backstory so rich it’s difficult to distill down to a single note. Constructed from precious natural ingredients sourced from around the globe (including rare raw materials like organic Egyptian honeysuckle, French Orris butter, Haitian vetiver and 35 million-year-old, fossilized tree amber from the Himalayas), each fragrance and hydration elixir in the bijoux collection reflects a personal talisman, discovery or journey.
Holly Tupper
Rosa- a modern take on a classic floral, and possibly Tupper’s most sentimental creation of all- is an ode to her mother, a prominent New York-based floral designer who was passionate about life and loved growing roses. “Concepts sometimes bubble in my head for years, like recurrent dreams,” says Tupper, who directs each phase of the perfume-making process, from formulation to fulfillment, in her stunning atelier, a massive 1920’s brick and concrete building in downtown San Antonio that in its former life was a Southwestern Bell telephone exchange.
The building’s low-fi history provides an apt analogy for Tupper’s philosophy when it comes to the botanicals at Cultus Artem’s core. She compares the differences between natural and synthetic ingredients to that of analog and digital recordings. “Natural ingredients consist of countless mini-molecules, so you get a lot of depth and nuance, while synthetic molecules are essentially one-note wonders,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with the digital recording- it suits a lot of people, and it’s good, quite good, in fact. But it’s not the same as an analog recording, where you get the wind on the strings, or the breath between the notes.” Naturally-derived ingredients also react more uniquely with a person’s biochemistry, according to the perfumer. “They are more sympathetic to us,” she says. “So when we find a fragrance that speaks to us, a “sillage” (French for the “wake” of scent we leave behind in a room) that we want to share, it becomes an extension of us.”
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Hand-crafted by Cultus Artem, Le Bonbons strand features natural, freshwater peals in various sizes (4-8 mm) with a magnetic clasp. The strands are designed to connect together to create one long strand or three layered.
Made-to-order.