Story be Editor-at-Large Carolina Ogliaro
There are fragrance houses that bottle beauty and then there are those that bottle destiny.
ALTAIA belongs irrevocably to the second category.
Marina Sersale and Sebastián Alvarez Murena, names already beloved in perfumery thanks to their iconic Eau d’Italie line, did not set out to create another collection. ALTAIA was not a business decision nor a branding exercise. It began as something far stranger, far more cinematic: the discovery of a shared family history stretching across oceans and centuries, a real-life prologue written long before they ever met.
And it is this improbable thread of fate, tender, improbable, serendipitous, that now forms the backbone of their most personal work. ALTAIA, A Long Time Ago In Argentina, is their olfactory archive of connection: each fragrance a memory refracted through modernity, each note a syllable in the private language of two people whose story, quite literally, began before their birth.
This season, that story unfolds once more but this time in smoke, wood and seduction.
WOO(E)D: The New Grammar of Desire
Their newest launch, WOO(E)D, is not a fragrance built to please, but it is built to pull. A smoky, sensual composition, its architecture is deceptively simple: rich woods smoldering beneath a sudden flash of bergamot; cardamom threading itself through the composition like a whispered invitation, a sweetness that refuses to let go.
In a market saturated with “sexy” scents, WOO(E)D smolders.
It lingers like a hand at the small of the back.
It woos.
“To woo is to captivate,” Marina says, “to offer a glimpse of your soul that makes someone linger just a little longer.”
But the wooing here is also metaphorical. It is the magnetic pull between Marina and Sebastián, distilled and modernized; a seduction that is not performance but recognition. When asked how they managed to capture this invisible chemistry within perfume, Sebastián pauses before offering a characteristically poetic response: “Not every phenomenon can be directly described in words. You cannot describe ‘red’, but you can say it is the color of an apple. With Woo(e)d, you cannot describe the seduction, but you can smell it. And indeed, WOO(E)D smells like the moment two souls realize they are mirrors.
A Love Story Unearthed, Then Reimagined
To understand ALTAIA’s emotional charge, one must first understand the shock of discovery: two people, tracing their family histories, suddenly stumbling upon a documented connection more than a century old in Argentina. A connection that predated them, yet feels as if it anticipated them.
I asked them how such a revelation shaped not only their relationship but the emotional language through which they compose fragrance. “The discovery brought disbelief at first,” they recall. “We thought we were unconsciously ‘finding’ things. Yet, everything was there, recorded, clear, a part of history. To translate this into a fragrance was another thing entirely. For that, we relied on the delicate, sensitive hand of Daphné Bugey, who authored the first three ALTAIA creations.” That triad, Don’t Cry For Me, By Any Other Name, Yu Son, remains the genetic code of the brand. Memory, love, coincidence, destiny: all rendered in exquisitely modern olfactory form.
Between Yesterday and Tomorrow
ALTAIA’s universe is suspended in a rare alchemy: not nostalgic, not futurist, but something in between, like standing on the threshold between what was and what might be.
So I asked them: when you create, do you follow nostalgia or let the future guide the hand? “Present and future,” they answer without hesitation. “The inspiration came from the past, but the execution is always contemporary. We don’t believe in ‘old’ in perfumery. We believe in today at its very best, with an eye on tomorrow.”
This, perhaps, is why the collection feels so quietly groundbreaking: it refuses the sentimentality of heritage or the sterility of futurism. It is deeply human, rooted in the now.
The Modern Poetry of Love
There is an elegance to their work that feels at once classic and vividly alive—never ornate, never overwrought. A clarity, a restraint, a pulse beneath the surface. When I ask how one translates something as unruly as love into perfume, Sebastián smiles with the resignation of someone answering an eternal question: “Smell is the most atavistic of our senses. We stood up, we privileged sight, but smell remained the place we come from. It evokes joy, fear, comfort, anguish, and of course the feeling that fuels it all: love.”
In ALTAIA, love is not an abstraction. It is a presence.
It breathes.
It remembers.
It returns.
The Seduction of a Story Still Being Written
There is a romantic cliché that when lovers find a shared ancestry, they open a bottle of wine to celebrate. Marina and Sebastián could have done this, uncorked a Malbec, and toasted the mystery of it all. Instead, they created an award-winning fragrance collection. This alone tells you everything.
ALTAIA is not merely a brand; it is the continuation of a story that began long before its protagonists were born. And WOO(E)D, smoky and tender and irresistibly alive, is its newest chapter, a fragrance that does not just seduce, but remembers.
As Marina says, “We woo because it is in our nature to desire closeness.”
Some love stories are written on paper. Theirs is written in scent.
