Remembering David Falsberg of Phoenicia Perfumes: The Indie Perfumer Who Refused To Play Nice

Perfume needs its troublemakers. On December 13, 2025, we lost one of the fiercest voices in indie scent: David Falsberg (January 22, 1954 - December 13, 2025), the singular mind behind Phoenicia Perfumes. He didn’t compose to flatter. He composed to provoke, to wrestle, to haunt.

My first encounter with Phoenicia Perfumes happened on a rainy afternoon, a strip that shouldn’t have worked but did. It opened like a struck match, then swerved into bitter resin and animalic shadow, before blooming into something unexpectedly tender. I remember thinking, I’m not sure I like this, but I cannot stop smelling it. That friction is rare. It’s also the point.

We talk a lot about “challenging” fragrances, but David Falsberg took that claim seriously. His scents pushed back emotionally, intellectually, viscerally. You didn’t just wear them, you entered them. They demanded quiet. They started conversations that lasted hours. They made friends argue and then pass wrists around the room until minds changed.

In a market that keeps polishing away the edges, Phoenicia Perfumes insisted on texture and tension. Smoke and salt, pith and leather, bright facets cut against a dark grain. Nothing felt sanitized. Nothing felt algorithmic. His work carried the stubborn honesty of small-batch perfumery, the kind where a formula is a living thing and a good idea is allowed to stay difficult.

If you’re coming to Phoenicia Perfumes for the first time, skip the paper. Wear on skin and wait. These compositions don’t beg for compliments in the opening. They unfurl on their own time and often land where you least expect. The destination is not always “pretty” or “clean” but it is arresting, and it lingers in the memory long after the last trace is gone.

We will miss the man and the stance. David Falsberg gave independent perfumery something bracing and necessary, a reminder that perfume can be argument and art, tenderness and abrasion, mystery and truth. He is gone, and yet the trail he burned into our collective nose refuses to fade. That’s a legacy. That’s a life in scent worth celebrating.