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As you climb the staircase to Debbie Lin and Na-Moya Lawrence’s second-story Hollywood apartment, a smell begins to materialize. It’s earthy and calming — grounding, even — and by the time you open their door, the scent envelops you. That’s because Lin and Lawrence have set up their artisan perfume company, Samar, in a corner of their home studio space. Sitting on a small foldaway table is a precision scale where the duo weighs out mixtures. Shelves along the wall are lined with hundreds of little bottles of essential oils and aroma chemicals.
“Have you smelled this?” Lin says, holding a bottle of green tea essential oil under my nose.
In this series, we highlight independent makers and artists, from glassblowers to fiber artists, who are creating original products in Los Angeles.
These headquarters may seem surprising for a duo that creates award-winning perfumes and has built a following of loyal fans. Their small-batch production, inspired by highly personal memories, challenges the norms of the industry. Rather than obsessing over fast growth, they embrace an ethos of exploration and creativity — along with a bit of humor.
Much of the messaging in the perfume landscape has been aspirational, Lawrence explains. “‘I’m in Paris and I’m a sexy lady,’” she says, mimicking the traditional advertising. “That’s all great, but now you can smell like a dirty pond goblin if you want. And that’s cool.”
Lin and Lawrence launched Samar in Seattle in 2022, succeeding at something many failed at: keeping a pandemic hobby alive. “We were talking about the places we want to travel when we’re able to, the things that we miss doing,” Lin says.
With names like Grove is in the Heart, Golden Hour and Holy Ghost, Samar’s unisex perfumes are made in small batches.
They tried various projects — at first, making pastries and later starting a skincare line — but realized that their real calling lay not in baking (“We’re not morning people,” says Lawrence with a laugh) and the beauty endeavor was proving to be too ambitious.
Lawrence had a passion for unusual scents ever since college, when a roommate introduced her to the indie fragrance brand Amorphous Perfume. The duo soon started thinking about entering perfumery. There was just one problem: Lin didn’t like perfume all that much. Lin told Lawrence that she had never encountered one she enjoyed.
For Lawrence? Mission accepted. She recalls thinking, “There’s no way there isn’t something we could find for [Lin] to enjoy. And so as we were talking as very audacious queers, ‘What if we just made it? But where the hell do we start?’”
Down the rabbit hole they went, scouring message boards and subreddits, where they found lots of bad advice — some of it dangerous even. Finally, they stumbled upon Perfumer’s Apprentice, Hermitage Oils and Pell Wall — material suppliers where you can order the fragrant oils and molecules that make up perfumes. “We were like, ‘Oh, this is the s—. This is the stuff we’re supposed to be using,’” Lawrence says.
To develop their full scent profiles, perfumes must macerate, or sit for several weeks to let the chemical processes take place, top. Lin demonstrates the dilution of fragrance material, above.
The two started making scents that were “grounded in specific memories and emotions that we wanted to relive for ourselves and share with other people,” Lin says. Soon, Samar was born. The name has a dual meaning in Arabic for both “fruits of paradise” and “evening conversations with friends,” which nicely sums up the feeling of their perfumes. Their first fragrances were Garden Heaux (a green, vegetal perfume) and Happy Trails (a campfire and woodsy scent inspired by Lin’s love of camping with friends in the wilderness near Seattle).
Now their home studio — the duo moved from Seattle to L.A. last April — is starting to take over parts of their apartment: A storage closet is full of bottles of finished perfume that’s macerating, a term for when perfume sits for several weeks to let the chemical processes take place.
For each fragrance, one of them takes “point” — for instance, on Garden Heaux, Lawrence acted as the perfumer and Lin as the fragrance evaluator, deciding whether the scent needed tweaking. It’s an intimate working environment for the partners in both work and life. “To be able to work closely together is really lovely,” says Lin. Because they have different palates, they’re each able to pick up on certain notes much more strongly. “So between the two of us, once we’re both happy, then we know we have something that’s really nice and balanced,” Lin adds.
Lawrence, right, smells a sample fragrance. Lawrence and Lin are partners in both work and life.
Of course, there’s not always an instant consensus. They found this out with Grove is in the Heart, the winner of an Art and Olfaction Award, presented in Lisbon in 2024. “[Lawrence] was like, ‘No, it’s not quite right. It should be sweeter, but not too sweet,’” says Lin. They rejiggered some materials but it was still missing something.
Lin says, “And I’m just like, ‘OK, what is it?’ She’s like, ‘I don’t know. You know the Trader Joe’s candied orange slices? Like that.’ So I taste it, and I’m like, ‘Well, what about this? Because it already is zesty, and it already has a little sweetness and the rindiness,’ and she’s like, ‘Juicy. It needs to be more juicy.’”
Lawrence laughs at this story, mentioning that sometimes they can go 13 or 14 trials before they succeed in satisfying both perfumers. “I wanted it juicier, but there I was standing with a dried orange slice in my hand,” she says.
“I would have never gotten there,” banters Lin.
Where they do align easily is in their commitment to making fragrance available and emotionally resonant. As a small business, Samar doesn’t benefit from the discounts enjoyed by major brands — big companies buy literally tons of essential oil at a discounted rate. So the brand reflects that smaller scale by offering smaller sizes at more approachable price points (bottles cost between $10 and $55). Each perfume comes in 2.25mL, 5mL or 10mL sizes, smaller than the industry standard of 30mL or 50mL. “A lot of people are samplers,” Lawrence says. “We’re samplers.”
Samar’s inclusiveness goes beyond their pricing. In L.A., they are surrounded by friends in the fragrance community, notably Orange County-based perfumers James Miju Nguyen and Kael Jeong, who run artisan perfume brands d.grayi and KST Scent, respectively. They’ve formed something of a queer indie perfumer club. For these makers, gender isn’t on the radar — a perfume can be enjoyed by all. In an Instagram post, Samar explained that at in-person shows, the company asks customers to suspend their beliefs about masculinity and femininity, and found that most men gravitate toward its more floral-forward and sweet perfumes like Beach Berry and Great Lei.
1. Shelves lined with bottles of essential oils and aromachemicals. 2. Samar packaging. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
One of Samar’s most distinct creations, Speakeasy, was inspired by 1920s underground queer bars and the illicit moonshine that fueled the Prohibition era. “It’s one of our most polarizing scents, actually, but it’s also one of my favorite ones that Debbie has made,” Lawrence says. They didn’t shy away from the scent’s complexity, leaning into the more unusual notes like gin, elderflower and leather. “I really love the darkness to it,” Lawrence adds.
Their exploration of scent is boundary-pushing. On a recent trip to Thailand, they found themselves at a chocolate cafe called Chocolate Culture Club, where they struck up a conversation with the owner, a chocolatier named MK. MK suggested they create perfumes from fermented chocolate husks, and before they left Bangkok, he gave them several bags of cacao husks.
Lawrence bounds over to a shelf with several jars of a brown tinctured slurry, the results of which they’ll use to create a cacao perfume. They’ll send half of each batch to Thailand for Chocolate Culture Club to sell. The chocolate-vinegar scent isn’t what one might think about when thinking of perfume, but that’s part of the fun of trying to find that perfect blend.
Lawrence says she’s intrigued by the potential for “slightly off scents.”
The final result will be “maybe beautiful, maybe just kind of weird,” she says. “But weird is beautiful.”
