The Scent Master: Carol Han Pyle of Nette

Carol Han Pyle has lived a life dominated by scent memory. When she was growing up in Sausalito, CA, Pyle spent many of her days at her mother's waterfront candle shop. "Some of my very first memories were of that candle store," she tells POPSUGAR. "I've always been — from the beginning — surrounded by candles and fragrance. It always smelled so good in there and I have such good scent memories from that period of time."

So when Pyle decided to take the leap and start her own brand, it comes as no surprise that it would be in the fragrance universe. After years working as a fashion editor and even founding her own digital agency, she wanted to build a brand from the ground up in a category she knew like the back of her hand. "Brands really have this opportunity to gather communities and to be positive catalysts of change," she says. "There is so much power behind brands if executed right."

With that ethos in mind, Nette was born in 2020. It started as a way for Pyle (who was at the time trying to get pregnant) to incorporate more clean products into her own routine and home. After successfully launching candles into the luxury market over the past two and a half years, Pyle was ready to move into the fragrance space, and the first five Nette Eau de Parfums launched exclusively with Sephora last month.

Keep reading to learn more about Pyle, her journey to launching Nette, and the science behind creating fragrances made to elicit an emotional response.

POPSUGAR: What was the catalyst that made you want to start Nette?
Carol Han Pyle: I was really getting into the clean beauty space. I had friends and peers launching their own successful clean beauty brands and I was learning so much from them about this whole world of clean. And I found myself cleaning out my beauty cabinet. At the time, I was also trying to get pregnant, so I was being super conscious of the products that I was using. And when I turned my attention to candles, which I've always loved, I felt disappointed. I couldn't find anything that fit what I was looking for.

Around my house the brands that I had were all of those like sort of legacy, iconic luxury brands. When I started researching them, I found [not a lot of transparency about the ingredients]. There's a brand that still uses 100 percent paraffin wax, which is known to be harmful especially when burned in a closed environment, and is also not great for the environment in general. On the other end of the token, I felt like there were these lower-priced candle brands that are just not inspiring to have around the house. So I felt like there had to be a way to bridge that gap and create a brand that would become this iconic luxury, household name, but that did things in modern ways, using the cleanest possible ingredients and formulations and being as sustainable as possible.

PS: Where does the name Nette come from?
CHP: "Nette" is a French word that loosely translates to "clean, frank, or direct." I love this concept of speaking straight and being able to say what you want and say what you mean. And then having that sort of clarity and transparency with our community and our customers. And I'm a '90s gal so I really like a minimal '90s aesthetic.

PS: Why make the move from candles to fragrance?
CHP: I wanted to launch with candles because of my very long history with candles. I knew the category really well and I had tried every single candle brand out there and knew what was missing. I also knew, from a purely business perspective, I didn't want to get pigeonholed into candles. I also wanted to launch fine fragrance perfectly. This is my first time being a brand founder, so I really wanted to get a couple of years of experience under my belt and work out any kinks, which I knew would pop up before launching this category that was super important to me.

PS: What did you have in mind for Nette's first five fragrances?
CHP: The thing about our fine fragrance collection, and the brand as a whole, is it really leans into the art of storytelling. Each one of our candles comes with copy that is meant to evoke the world that we imagine the scent belongs to. That was really the process for me in terms of developing these fragrances. So for La Forêt ($120), which is our very woodsy, sort of minimalist fragrance, I just had this vision of a woman, a best-selling author who was sitting in this glass house in the middle of the woods filled with curves and steel accents and she's wearing like The Row and she's writing her fifth dystopian novel — that's how that would smell. For Rose Parade ($120), I was imagining an Ivy League campus, with rose bushes climbing up the old stone walls; an American Lit class in session with the windows open, and the tennis team walking across campus, and it is just like a very fresh preppy scent. I imagine worlds and then formulate scents to go into those worlds. I feel like I'm actually a frustrated writer deep inside.

PS: You made these fragrances in partnership with the fragrance house IFF, specifically in their Science of Wellness program. Can you talk about the science beyond the technology they used to create fragrances that create an emotional response?
CHP: The tagline for the collection is "fragrance you feel." [The concept that] I'm wearing perfume to like attract someone . . . it's so old school. I really felt there was going to be a shift where people would be wearing fragrances for themselves and for their own joy. Fragrances that you want to sleep in because it just calms you and makes you relax. When I was talking to [IFF] about it, they said, you need to develop these fragrances with Science of Wellness, a program that they have in-house.

Not a lot of brands have used it yet but it's a program that can scientifically measure emotional responses to fragrance using a combination of neuroscience and AI. How it works is that they have two different methods of testing. One is declarative. So they will ask people to smell something and just tell them how they feel. The other is they will tell you to smell something and then study your brainwaves. They take all of this data then and put it into a big database and sort it with AI. Their perfumers then have all of this information to go off of when formulating so they can develop fragrances with real intention and data behind it.

PS: What is the response you most wanted your fragrances to elicit?
CHP: Confidence. That emotion was really important to me. I felt like confidence really needed to be the common theme that ties every fragrance together in the collection. And then there's an underlying emotion that's also boosted: either relaxation or mindfulness. So in the end, [it's about] a quiet confidence and an assuredness in your abilities. I think that that's a really big differentiator in terms of our fragrances [in the functional fragrance] landscape. It was really important to me to be able to have that scientific data behind it.

PS: What is your favourite smell?
CHP: Hands down, popcorn is my favourite smell. There's nothing like the smell of popcorn. It just comforts me so much.

PS: Do you have a favourite scent from the Nette collection?
CHP: That's so hard. I really love Thé Vanille ($120). It was inspired by the tea houses in Tokyo. It has this really special, sort of maté or tea note that runs through it that adds an astringency to the vanilla. I love vanilla as a fragrance ingredient. It just makes it a little bit salty or more mineral-y, less sweet and cloying.