Behind the Brand

Why I Do What I Do

People see me as confident. Outgoing, sure of himself, comfortable in a room. What they don't see is that this version of me is built, not born. For most of my life I was the opposite of that person, and the road between the two is the whole reason (S)MER exists.

I grew up gay and closeted. That means I spent most of my childhood and teenage years performing someone I wasn't, watching every word and every gesture, editing myself in real time so nobody would look too closely. On top of that I had cystic acne, the kind that doesn't just hurt your skin, it hurts how you let yourself be seen. I was bullied. I was never the cool kid, never the jock. I was a bit of a nerd, all I wanted was to do art subjects, and most lunchtimes I'd sit in the art room by myself just to hide. I never fitted in anywhere, and I tried: I changed schools five times looking for a place where I would. I'm still looking. I have never quite found "my people," and I've made peace with the fact that I might just keep building the room instead of waiting to be let into one.

When I finally came out, people assume that's the relief, the finish line. In some ways it is. But what nobody tells you is that coming out is also a kind of rebirth, and being born again means starting from zero. All those years of performing had to be unlearned. The confidence I'd never been allowed to build as a kid, I now had to build as an adult, from scratch, in public, while still figuring out who I actually was underneath the performance. That is a strange and humbling place to stand.

Then you spend years actually finding out who that person is. Different friends, different relationships, different cities, all in search of something you can't quite name. There is no roadmap for it. Nobody hands you a guide. That's part of the journey too, the not knowing. What I've learned is that confidence actually shows up the moment you stop giving a fuck, when you realise you're never going to find people exactly like you, because you're one of one, and so is everyone else. The people you choose to spend your time with are one of one too, and you love them for their differences, not in spite of them. It's the place I've spent the years since trying to climb out of, a little more each day.

That climb is my mission. Not just for me, but for anyone else standing where I stood. (S)MER is about handing people back their confidence. Making them feel good in their own skin. Making them feel sexy, hot, seductive, words that used to be normal to say out loud and now feel almost embarrassing, like we've collectively agreed to tone ourselves down. I think that character, that willingness to feel and be desired, is quietly disappearing from how we present ourselves, and I want to bring it back.

I think about the 90s a lot, an era I wasn't even alive for, because it feels like the last time self-expression and sensuality were allowed to just exist without apology. People dressed for effect. Fragrance was seduction, not a lifestyle mood board. Somewhere between then and now, scent got domesticated. Walk down any fragrance aisle today and you're sold a picture of a flower, a vanilla cookie, a "clean linen" candle in a bottle. And I get it, sure, those smell fine. But I don't want to smell fine. I don't want to smell like a cookie. Nobody's leaning in close to someone because they smell like dessert. I want to smell like a person you can't stop thinking about. I want to smell hot. I want people to lean in.

That's really what this comes down to: scent is one of the most beautiful, underrated tools we have for feeling like ourselves, and I think we've let the industry flatten it into something safe and forgettable. I didn't grow up appreciating that. It's something I've come to understand slowly, the same way I came to understand my own confidence, not all at once, but a little more each day, each year. And now that I see how powerful it is, I want to hand that same appreciation to everyone else. Not just "here's a nice smell," but here's a tool to feel sexy, to feel seductive, to feel like the fullest, most unapologetic version of yourself, the version I had to fight to become.

Everything that made my early life hard, the acne, the bullying, the schools I never belonged to, the years spent hiding who I was, is also exactly what makes me who I am now. I'm not interested in pretending that stuff didn't happen or that it doesn't still shape me. It's the whole reason I care this much about confidence in other people. I know what a confidence of zero feels like. I know what it costs to build it back. So when I say (S)MER is about helping people pick that confidence up, I don't mean it as a marketing line. I mean I've lived on both sides of it, and I know which side I want to help people get to.

That's the mission. Not just to make something that smells good, but to give people back a piece of themselves that the world has been slowly talking them out of: the sexy, the seductive, the unapologetically self-possessed. I want people to feel the way I'm still learning to feel every single day: a little bit better, a little more myself, a little more ready to be seen.

-
Edward Hansen
Founder