OzParfum YŪREI by Pierre Bénard Ségu

OzParfum YŪREI  

“Life is like a trail of perfume, leaving behind memories of precious encounters.” For Pierre Bénard Ségu, perfumery has been a profession as well as a spiritual journey. A biochemist by training and an alchemist by vocation, he spent six years alongside a doctor in plant biotechnology, absorbing an olfactory culture that spans across disciplines, from the botany and chemistry of aromatic plants to the history, anthropology, and psychology of smell, the invisible threads that link scent to memory, emotion, and ritual. This broadening of horizons led him further down the path, continuing his training journey in Montpellier and then in Grasse, the heart of the perfume world. There, working with companies specialized in fragrance composition and natural raw materials, he learned to transform matter, to sculpt, shape, and refine it until it reveals its finest essence.

In his words: “I think that my search for aesthetics has always been present, and my medium has manifested itself through smell and perfume. If I had chosen a different path, I might have been a musician or maybe a poet. But I am also very visual and have always been attracted to paintings. I am a fan of Soulages – the “painter of outrenoir”, and have always admired how he plays with light and its absence.” All the facets of his work: perfumer-creator, olfactory scenographer, educator, expert in natural raw materials are gathered under one name: OSMOART, founded in 2003 as an association built on the credo of “perfumes, colors and sounds”. With it, Pierre has spent more than two decades weaving multi-sensory and synesthetic experiences around culture, education, and olfactory research. And at its twentieth anniversary, the porcelain wedding, a new chapter began: OzParfum, the brand through which Pierre distills his ideal of independent, authentic, cultural, and artistic perfumery: perfume as art, as connection, as addiction, yet still remaining, as he says, close to nature, at the very source. “The source that fills the finest bottles and perfumes them with the souls of the plants and the people who cultivate them. This is life. This is love.”

Pierre Bénard Ségu, image via the brand

YŪREI is the second personal creation by Pierre Bénard Ségu for OZPARFUM. This creation originates from a conceptual prompt: “what does a ghost smell like?” presented during the first edition of HALO 1, part of the olfactory and multisensory exhibition De la matière à l’esprit.  “Perfume is the mind that conceives it, it is the mind that composes it. Of material and immaterial, perfume is like a transparent entity.” Impalpable, this body, this volatile soul is a messenger that reaches our receptors, our emotions, our memories, our memory. An allegory of perfume, the spirit is that olfactory form in the air we breathe, inhale, and exhale, which lets us know we are alive”

OzParfum YŪREI, created by photographer Nicolas Sénégas with contortionist Lise Pauton as model

So… what does a ghost smell like? I must confess, I have often thought about it, but my mind usually wandered through Victorian places and spiraled outward to my usual roaming grounds: the Slavic wraiths and noon wraiths, hovering over wheat fields at midday; the strigoi of my own local folklore, restless dead that walk out of their graves to drain the living; the draugr of Norse sagas, guarding their barrows; the humid hauntings of Southern Gothic; Edgar Allan Poe’s buried hearts still beating under the floorboards; Lovecraft’s cosmic dread seeping through the walls of my inner Innsmouth – all still human, just a tinge theatrical, too present: versions of ghosts that make their presence felt, as our friends from Pantera would put it, in a vulgar display of power. That is my reference comfort zone: ghosts that are still human, still understandable, and (as corny as it sounds) still seductive.

The Japanese yūrei is another creature altogether, unnerving, smelling of unworldly dark things that contaminate reality. She is the pale figure at the edge of the frame, the white kimono dissolving into mist, the long black hair curtaining a face you know you should not look at too closely. She belongs to the hour when the veil between the worlds vanishes, and she carries with her not fear, per -se, but a shiver of recognition of something we all know… but would rather forget.

photo for OzParfum YŪREI, created by photographer Nicolas Sénégas with contortionist Lise Pauton as model

This is where Yūrei begins: in a cold room. Stone walls, stone floor, the temperature of places where time has stood still for centuries. A shrine at dawn, moments before the first ray of light breaks through. The incense is lit, and there is a breath of something unnerving in the air, cold and metallic, like the taste of winter coiling under the movement of the trees outside, like cold dust raised in a slow spiral after a spectral presence has passed. After a while, the resinous smoke starts curling — the perfume of the threshold between the human and whatever listens on the other side. The first contact, though, is tactile before it is olfactive: the icy kiss of the perfume’s roll-on ball against the skin.

 photo for OzParfum YŪREI, created by photographer Nicolas Sénégas with contortionist Lise Pauton as model

Then the perfume rises, imponderable and white –  the soul leaving its body of flesh and bone. Spectral dusty white petals, ones that have been pressed between the pages of an old book, petals that barely remember their vegetal nature – are lifted into the air on a gust of cold aldehydes. Pierre describes it as the musky note of laundry evaporating when a hot iron glides over a burial sheet – and once you’ve read that, you cannot unsmell it: the steam, the pressed linen, the unholy cleanliness of it all. The aldehydes turn cold and purple, the bruised violet-blue of shadows on snow, of the sky at the old “hour of the ox” between two and half past two in the morning, when the yūrei are said to walk.

  OzParfum YŪREI, created by photographer Nicolas Sénégas with contortionist Lise Pauton as model

Mineral notes run beneath like blue veins through marble: wet stone, ozone, the electric smell of air before the storm, with a camphorous hit that clears the head and narrows the eyes to hunter mode, and something earthy pulling downward: the undergrowth of a cellar, roots and cool dust, the dark vegetal breath of things that grow in the dark. And then, unexpectedly, a hearth: the smell of polished wood and candlelight, of a house and the echo of small gestures, playing in reverse. Underneath it all, the musks,  pale, spectral, carrying an ultraviolet halo.

Mood photo for OzParfum YŪREI, created by photographer Nicolas Sénégas with contortionist Lise Pauton as model

“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality,” said Virginia Woolf, and I wholeheartedly agree. Yūrei is a perfume of held breath and unfinished gestures, of desire suspended between worlds,  a sensuality built around absence, where what is withheld haunts far longer than what is given.

Editor’s note: The perfume is to be experienced while listening to the EP SKY’S THE LIMIT, performed by ИИ (linked here) – and please, allow me a personal confession: as a die-hard Nine Inch Nails fan, the sight of those mirrored letters sent an immediate jolt of recognition, as if this ghost knew exactly which of my dormant obsessions to awaken. On the EP, Miku Koyama’s voice reads the Japanese version of “Le Parfum” by Charles Baudelaire, from the “Un Fantôme” series in Les Fleurs du mal. The circle closes with an almost eerie precision: OsmoArt was born out of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” – perfumes, colors and sounds answering one another,  and two decades later, here is Baudelaire again, summoned through a ghost-voice, reading a poem about a phantom, in the language of the yūrei. Breaking open the glass ampoule that contains the perfume is a ritual in itself: it comes equipped with a roll-on, its steel bead cold like the metal of a stethoscope.

Top: Miyazaki’s Citrus Fruits, Pepper Dust, Rock salt, Incense of beliefs, Leather aroma; Middle: Metallic vapor, Nylon aldehyde, Cedar oxide, Encaustic icon, White Lady;Base: Pleasure, Celestial bodies, Ultraviolet glow, Spectral musks, Cosmic Musks

Nicoleta Tomsa, Senior Editor

Disclosure: Sample kindly gifted by the brand, and as always, opinions are my own.

OzParfum YŪREI photo via the brand

Thanks to the generosity of OzParfum, we have a roll-on sample of YŪREI and a sample of Lilith for one registered reader from Europe. You must register or your entry will not count. To be eligible, please leave a comment saying what sparks your interest based on Nicoleta’s review and where you live in Europe. Draw closes July 16, 2026

Also, check out my review of Lilith and a list of Pierre Bénard Ségu’s articles for ÇaFleureBon: Tuberose: a Love Story, BAUDELAIRE: From Matter to Spirit, Out of Africa, Trip to Bulgaria, Life is a Slipstream of perfume and his ingredient post on Bergamot

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