Toskovat' Amaretto In The Melting Room (Betrayal Collection) Extrait 60ml

Founded by David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi in Bucharest in 2022, Toskovat’ is an independent perfume house built around a fascination with memory, storytelling and the more complex sides of human experience. With a background in film and screenwriting, David turned to perfumery during the pandemic as a new way of telling stories, creating fragrances that could transport people through scent when travel and cinema were temporarily out of reach.

The name Toskovat’ comes from the Slavic word toska, a difficult-to-translate feeling associated with longing, melancholy, restlessness and nostalgia. This idea of an emotion that cannot quite be put into words became central to the brand and its concept of 'extraits de mémoire' - memory extracts. Rather than simply composing fragrances around a list of pleasant ingredients, David uses scent to explore fragments of human experience, from childhood and love to loss, faith, consumerism and death.

Toskovat’s first fragrance, Silent at the Theme Park, was originally created for David’s mother. Inspired by the lilac growing outside his childhood home and hazy memories of an early amusement-park holiday, it established the brand’s approach: personal memories provide the starting point, but the finished fragrance is intended to evoke something more universal. David describes his perfumes as memories of other people that he has bottled, looking for experiences that others can recognise in their own lives.

The fragrances themselves are deliberately unconventional, often combining familiar and unexpected materials to create powerful olfactory narratives. Toskovat is not interested in making perfume simply to smell beautiful; instead, each composition is designed to provoke a reaction, trigger a memory or create a particular emotional atmosphere. David is largely self-taught, having developed his understanding of perfumery through experimentation and an ever-expanding palette of raw materials.

Storytelling extends into every part of the brand. Toskovat’s bottles and boxes are accompanied by visual imagery, while its manifesto encourages the wearer to spend time with each fragrance and revisit the memories, sights and sounds behind it. The brand even offers bespoke perfume commissions, working directly with clients to transform their own memories, emotions and experiences into one-of-a-kind fragrances.

Today, Toskovat remains an intensely personal independent perfume house, with a growing collection spanning several thematic series. At its heart is a simple but ambitious idea: to use fragrance as a way of capturing something essentially human, the fleeting, imperfect and often inexplicable memories that make us who we are.