YSAYO: the 2025 Puredistance enigma with Antoine Lie

YSAYO. I said it out loud three times this morning and it refused to sit still. It flickers, it pivots, it feels invented on purpose. That is because it is. YSAYO is a word created by Jan Ewoud Vos, the eye and ear behind Puredistance, and it names the house’s 2025 perfume made with Antoine Lie.

If you follow Puredistance, you know they do monastic focus rather than flood-the-feed launches. One or two bottles can define their year, and the concentrations usually land in extrait territory, which means the house asks you to listen closely. Bringing in Antoine Lie for YSAYO is not a quiet choice. Lie is a form-shifter, comfortable with shadow and lift, with texture that hums under the skin. When Vos coins a name and Lie writes the sentence around it, I expect a statement, not an afterthought.

There are no official notes yet, and that is exactly what makes the name so itchy in my head. The double Y sounds like two pins on a map, the open vowels suggest a breath held then released. Will YSAYO lean mineral and sheer, or will it bloom into smoked florals and skin-warmed resins. Lie can pull toward both bright volatility and slow-focus density, and Puredistance usually edits until only the essential remains. I keep picturing a pale silhouette that hides a pulse, a clean line that breaks into velvet at arm’s length.

What I appreciate here is the restraint. A single invented word signals authorship. It tells me Vos is steering concept first, not pantone-and-panegyric. It also tells me Puredistance wants something you feel before you can name it, which is very on brand for a house that has made a virtue of depth and longevity over fireworks.

Until the bottle lands, YSAYO is an earworm of a title and a promise filed under 2025. I like the uncertainty. I like that it asks a question out loud. If the juice matches the tension in the name, this could be the year’s quiet storm from Puredistance and Antoine Lie.