“I do not chase rare ingredients for their rarity. I chase the extraordinary things nature has hidden within them. Chemical Engineering gives me the means to uncover them. Perfumery gives me the freedom to make them eternal.”
Some perfumers begin with a formula. Artisan Dixit begins with an ingredient.
A forgotten botanical, an unusual resin, a particular expression of oud, or an absolute whose character changes with the slightest variation in extraction. His obsession with raw materials goes far beyond collecting them. He hunts them down himself, studies their origins, compares their aromatic nuances, and builds a meticulously curated palette of ingredients that reflects his own olfactory imagination.
A Chemical Engineer with advanced training in Polymer Engineering, Dixit possesses an uncommon understanding of what happens before a natural material ever reaches a perfumer's bench. Extraction temperatures, solvents, pressures, fractions, and distillation techniques are not merely industrial procedures to him. They are instruments of artistic expression. He works with extraction laboratories and distillers, guiding their processes to coax out the exact aromatic character he seeks. Sometimes the finest ingredient is not the one readily available. It is the one that must be created.
His journey began long before Perito Moreno. As a co-founder of Dixit & Zak Fragrances, he was instrumental in creating compositions that earned a legendary reputation among fragrance enthusiasts. Those years were spent exploring the boundaries of perfumery, understanding the temperament of difficult materials, and learning that an extraordinary fragrance cannot be hurried into existence. But with every creation came a deeper hunger to explore ingredients that conventional perfumery often overlooks.
Perito Moreno is the expression of that hunger. An independent artistic house where chemistry serves instinct, where rare naturals meet carefully chosen aroma molecules, and where the character of an ingredient matters more than its price or reputation. Here, Dixit is not interested in recreating what the world already knows. He is interested in discovering what it has yet to smell. Every bottle carries something of that pursuit, a lifetime spent chasing the extraordinary, one raw material at a time.
Five steps on one page. Below, eight chapters from the studio: the slow way, and the only way he knows.
Where a perfume begins before a single ingredient is touched. A conversation with a customer, a flower that blooms for only a few hours, a damp stone wall after the monsoon. There is no formula yet. Only a question.
“What if I could make someone smell exactly what I am imagining?”
Essential oils, floral absolutes, aged resins, woods, tinctures and modern molecules. An oud oil from one region may have little resemblance to another; two rose absolutes may express entirely different personalities.
“Materials that have something meaningful to say to one another.”
Imagine twenty remarkable musicians in a room, asked to perform a symphony without the music. One trial follows another, and a tiny change in proportion can give a fragrance a completely different personality.
“It is being discovered.”
Beneath the notes on a product page lies a network of supporting materials: some give diffusion, some soften sharp edges, some create the sensation of a material that is not there at all.
“The notes tell you what to imagine. The formula determines what you experience.”
A beautiful smell is not necessarily a finished perfume. Some compositions shine on a blotter and behave differently on skin. Sometimes, after precious oils and countless hours, the perfume has to be started again.
“A fortune spent learning what must not go into the bottle.”
Hundreds of formulas live in the studio at any time: some nearly finished, some waiting for an ingredient or a better idea, some too daring, a few too extravagant to launch.
“Some are waiting for their perfumer.”
About four bespoke perfumes a year: personal commissions that translate someone’s memories and imagination into a composition of its own, through several directions and many trials.
“Ideas travel. One experiment quietly informs another.”
His freestyle blending: materials go into a large vessel, guided by the growing composition, not a fixed batch weight. If the balance arrives at five kilograms and three hundred grams, that is where it ends.
“The endpoint is determined by the smell.”
An hour at the studio in Pune, or a call. Mr Dixit listens, takes notes, and writes a perfume that exists once. Bespoke quotes are given separately.
Kothrud, Pune. By appointment only, because the desk is usually covered in trials.
Retail partners: Perfume Bay and others.