Miguel Matos: The Man Who Thinks in Scents

23/06/2026
Écrit par Hervé Mathieu-Chaty
Miguel Matos: The Man Who Thinks in Scents

(c)DR

There are those who talk about perfume, and others who think about it. Miguel Matos belongs to the latter category—those for whom the sense of smell is never an end in itself but rather the starting point for a broader reflection on art, the body, memory, and the human condition. A journalist, critic, exhibition curator, author, and self-taught perfumer, he is one of the most unique figures to emerge from the niche perfume world over the past twenty years. He is unlike anyone else—and neither are his perfumes.

The Child of the Counterculture

 

Miguel Matos was born and lives in Almada, a city on the south bank of the Tagus River, just a few minutes from Lisbon by ferry. The Tagus, the golden light of the estuary, the azulejos on the facades, and the avant-garde electronic music clubs he frequents in London and Berlin are the raw materials that shape his sensory world.

For while Miguel Matos loves tradition, he does not limit himself to it. He seeks inspiration wherever it arises: in a childhood memory just as much as in the dim light of a dance floor at four in the morning.

For more than two decades, he explored this world primarily through words. As a journalist and art and culture critic, he developed a keen eye and an ability to contextualize works within their era and their unique aesthetic. He would bring this entire intellectual background with him into the world of perfumery.

The Critic Who Wanted to Understand

In 2013, Miguel Matos joined the Fragrantica team as an editor and columnist. What immediately set him apart from his peers was his application of art theories to olfactory analysis. Where other critics describe, Miguel Matos questions. He breaks down the narrative structures of a fragrance the way one might analyze a Mark Rothko painting or a Tarkovsky film. His writings, which have been nominated several times for the Fragrance Foundation Awards and the Perfumed Plume Awards, demand a level of intellectual rigor that is rare in a field where language often settles for the lyrical or the purely technical.

But the critic Miguel Matos soon felt a frustration that spurred him to action: the gap between writing about perfumes and understanding how they are created weighed heavily on him. He decided to cross that boundary, almost out of epistemological necessity.“I wanted to understand perfumery from the inside. I also wanted to be able to write more accurately about fragrances, by knowing the ingredients and how they interact,” he confides. He then began working on his own, using modest-quality raw materials purchased online, feeling his way forward, doubting himself, and reading everything he could find on composition, aesthetics, and olfactory theory.

His encounter with perfumer Christian Carbonnel changed everything. Carbonnel sensed in Miguel’s early compositions a raw talent—still unpolished but genuine. He began to mentor him and sent him high-quality raw materials. The invitation to collaborate with his laboratory offered Miguel Matos something he hadn’t yet allowed himself to believe was possible: a legitimate creative space.“I used to say I wasn’t an artist, but perfumers like Carbonnel and Ramon Monegal made me believe in myself,” he admits. 

The Philosophy of the Sublime Flaw

Miguel Matos, as a perfumer, has a deep aesthetic conviction—inherited from his years as an art critic—which he expresses bluntly:“My goal is not to seek beauty; I seek a disturbing composition. That doesn’t mean I’m looking for ugliness; but I love imperfections, sharp edges, and asymmetries. I love the slight flaw or imbalance that keeps me interested in a fragrance. Perfectly polished works bore me.”

This aesthetic principle makes his perfumes stand out from the crowd. At a time when even niche perfumery sometimes leans toward a form of consensual comfort, Miguel Matos deliberately chooses to create friction. His compositions do not seek to please immediately. They seek to linger, to provoke, to return.

The other pillar of the “Matos method” is his encyclopedic knowledge of scents. Decades spent analyzing thousands of fragrances—both contemporary and vintage—have given him a keen awareness of what has already been done. 

"Having a broad olfactory culture means that my nose is trained in the history of perfume, and that influences my work," he says. The apparent paradox of the self-taught expert is resolved as follows: what he did not learn in school, he absorbed through immersion, reading, experimentation, and listening to the masters.

Milestones: A Chronicle of a Personal World

Original Jungle Jezebel bottle - Sarah Baker Perfumes. The bottle is adorned with long eyelashes and a cap featuring blonde hair

 

Jungle Jezebel (Sarah Baker Perfumes, 2018)

It all starts here. The first fragrance created by Miguel Matos to be marketed by a perfume house, Jungle Jezebel for Sarah Baker Perfumes is already a manifesto. The composition draws from both high and low olfactory culture, blends seemingly contradictory references, and forces you to contemplate contradiction and harmony at the same time. For perfume enthusiasts accustomed to linear narratives, it comes as a shock. For those seeking something unlike anything else, it’s a revelation.

Germaine (Miguel Matos Perfumes, 2019)

A tribute to Germaine Cellier, a pioneering perfumer and creator of Bandit and Fracas, two of the most radical works in classic perfumery. Germaine follows in the tradition of architecturally structured chypre fragrances, opening with notes of juniper, bergamot, and lavender before revealing a heart of unsettling complexity. For a self-taught perfumer to tackle such a landmark creation is nothing short of an intellectually daring move. The result, according to Matos himself, is one of his works that best embodies his edgy aesthetic. Not comfortable. Not forgettable.

"Germaine" perfume bottle by Miguel Matos

Young Hearts (Bruno Acampora Profumi, 2020) — Art & Olfaction Award, Independent Category

International recognition. In 2020, at the Art and Olfaction Awards—the most prestigious awards in the global independent perfumery industry—Young Hearts, created for the Italian house Bruno Acampora Profumi, won the prize in the Independent category. This fragrance, both emotional and structurally sophisticated, illustrates Matos’s ability to craft compositions that directly touch something intimate within the wearer, without ever sacrificing complexity for the sake of accessibility.

Tabacco Smeraldo (Miguel Matos Perfumes, 2022) — Art & Olfaction Award, Artisan category

Two years later, a second victory at the Art & Olfaction Awards, this time in the Artisan category. Tabacco Smeraldo is one of his most radical creations: a tobacco fragrance that stubbornly rejects any conventional sweetness. No comforting vanilla, no enveloping amber. Only green tobacco leaves—herbal, damp, almost vegetal in their rawness.“I wanted to create my own vision of tobacco—focused entirely on green tobacco leaves, not the smoke,” he explains. The fragrance itself is a deep, almost unsettling green. Accords of black pepper, violet, narcissus, and oak moss are woven around this vegetal heart with disarming precision. For tobacco fragrance enthusiasts who have tried it all, Tabacco Smeraldo is often the only satisfying answer.

Berlin (Miguel Matos Perfumes, 2024)

With Berlin, Miguel Matos creates an olfactory map of a place dear to him: the club culture of the German capital, its basements, its artificial light, and its radical freedom. A unisex perfume extract that captures something elusive—the atmosphere of a night unlike any other. The fragrance has garnered high praise from the community, confirming that Miguel Matos has found in this subject a realm that perfectly matches his sensibility.

The Curator: When Perfume Becomes Philosophy

Since 2015, Miguel Matos has been organizing exhibitions that place perfume at the heart of a transdisciplinary exploration. His Synesthesia Project / Per Fummum, presented at the Miguel Justino Gallery in Lisbon, explores the sensory connections between smell and the visual arts. In 2017, *Making the Body Think*—a title borrowed from phenomenology—was presented simultaneously at the Casa da Cerca Contemporary Arts Center in Almada and at the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles.

This project is revealing of his method. Miguel asks several perfumers and olfactory artists to respond to a selected literary excerpt—not to translate it, but to translate the sensations it evokes into scents. The resulting works are displayed alongside pieces by perfumers such as Anatole Lebreton and Antonio Gardoni, and the whole forms part of an improvised, experimental, and primitive sound installation. Here, perfumery is conceived as theorized by Chandler Burr: not as a luxury product, but as a work of art in its own right.

“As a writer and thinker on perfume, my goal is not only to succumb to the olfactory paradise of perfumers’ creations, but also to explore all the possibilities of fragrance—from simple pleasure to critical thought and the interplay of smell with the arts and social perspectives,” he writes in the exhibition catalog.

The Author: Putting the Invisible into Words

Miguel Matos is also the author of several books. *Portuguese Artists in Focus* explores the world of contemporary art in his country with the same discerning eye he applies to perfumery. *Making the Body Think* accompanies the exhibition of the same name and is a rare essay on the phenomenology of smell. *The Fragrant Zodiac*—published in Portuguese—offers a poetic and analytical exploration of fragrances through the lens of astrological signs, as a way to humanize and personalize our relationship with smell. These books are not popular science works: they are intellectual statements on what perfume can and should be.

"As a writer and thinker on perfume, my goal is not only to succumb to the olfactory paradise created by perfumers, but also to explore all the possibilities of perfume—from simple pleasure to critical thought and the interplay of smell with the arts and social perspectives,” he writes in the exhibition catalog.

The Man Behind the Bottles

Those who know Miguel Matos describe him as a man of contrasts. His outward appearance—that unapologetic “bear underground” style, his perpetually black hair, his imposing build—might suggest a facade of arrogance. The reality is quite the opposite. “He’s incredibly humble and sometimes even shy, which contrasts with his strong outward image,” confides one of his colleagues. He’s the kind of person who, in a room full of perfumers he admires, would rather listen to them than impose his own voice.

On weekends, he takes the first flight to London or Berlin—not for business, but for avant-garde electronic music and the underground clubs that have always been the other side of his sensory life. This dual identity—the world of academic art and the world of nocturnal counterculture—directly fuels his creations. 

The names of his tracks say it all: Hard Techno, Club Majestic, Olimpia Club, Palace Club, Berlin, Insomnia. In his mind, there is no hierarchy among these worlds. Raves and philosophy speak the same language, as long as you know how to listen. Raves and philosophy speak the same language, as long as you know how to listen.

His studio-gallery in Almada reflects his personality: a workspace and exhibition space where the boundaries between creating a fragrance and presenting a work of art are deliberately blurred. It is there that he crafts his fragrances in small, artisanal batches, by hand, with the help of Christian Carbonnel, who remains his technical mentor.

Why We Follow Him Closely

SCENTISSIME’s selection is based on a simple principle: we don’t look for fragrances that win us over with their marketing, but rather fragrances that stand the test of time—ones that linger in the memory long after the bottle has been set aside. Miguel Matos embodies this standard perfectly.

A two-time winner of the Art and Olfaction Awards, he is one of the few figures to have successfully made the full transition: from critic to author, from author to curator, and from curator to creator. Each stage has fueled the next, and it is this depth of experience that is reflected in each of his creations.

His fragrances aren’t meant to appeal to the masses. They’re meant for those seeking something authentic, imperfect, and unforgettable. 

Treat yourself to the excellence of his creations, carefully selected by our curator. Free shipping throughout the European Union, free returns, personalized advice : SCENTISSIME guides you in your search for the fragrance that suits you best. 

Miguel Matos's Fragrances on SCENTISSIME

Explore these fragrances and many more in our online store, and feel free to take our Scent Quiz to discover the fragrance that perfectly suits your tastes. Follow us on Instagram for real-time updates. To enjoy the exclusive benefits of our loyalty and referral program, simply click here: The List.

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