From the Stage to the Bench: FUMparFUM and Dreaming Ceylon
Aistis Mickevicius spent years as a Lithuanian stage actor before deciding he could not work with directors. He now runs one of the Baltics' most distinctive perfume houses.
Most perfumers arrive at the bench from chemistry, or from a family business, or from a long apprenticeship inside one of the big houses. Aistis Mickevicius arrived from the stage — and from a growing certainty that the stage was not going to work out.
The actor who could not work with directors
Born in Vilnius in 1976, he trained in acting at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre under Dalia Tamuleviciute, one of the defining teachers of Lithuanian theatre. He went on to work as a freelance actor across most of the country's serious stages: the National Drama Theatre, the State Youth Theatre, the Oskaras Korsunovas Theatre, the Vilnius Small Theatre, and later Domino.
By his own account he played more than a dozen significant dramatic roles and was not happy in any of them. The problem was not the work but the arrangement. He has said plainly that he never found common ground with directors, however brilliant they were — that a strong directorial personality does not always want a discussion about what the actor is supposed to do, and that this way of working simply did not suit him.
So he moved. He went into comedy, into parody, into radio. He spent nearly a decade at the station M-1, dubbed animated and feature films for Lithuanian television, wrote scripts, hosted events, and built recurring comic characters — including an elderly pensioner who became better known in Lithuania than most of his dramatic parts ever were. The instinct had been there since childhood: he has described imitating Alla Pugacheva as a boy, using a wooden microphone his grandfather had carved and a strand of tinsel from the Christmas tree.
A hobby that got out of hand
Perfume began as an escape from the routine of the radio booth. It stopped being a hobby somewhere between the studies he undertook and the several thousand euros' worth of failed trials he has cheerfully admitted to pouring down the toilet. FUMparFUM was founded in Vilnius in 2011 — the name a triple pun on the Latin per fumum, the Italian profumo and the French parfum.
The house has stayed deliberately small: handmade, limited editions, natural and synthetic materials chosen without dogma about either. Roughly fifty-six fragrances now sit in the catalogue, alongside scent installations for galleries and exhibitions. In 2016 he published Kvepalai, the first book about perfumery written in Lithuanian. He is routinely described as independent Lithuania's first professional perfumer, and the description holds up.
The theatrical training did not go to waste. It shows in the naming — Drama Queen, Clown, Taxi Driver, The Priest, Plague — and in a body of work that treats a fragrance as a character rather than a mood board. His project The Smell of God, built from the smells of Italian churches, produced six scents from a man who describes himself as entirely irreligious and interested in religion the way an anthropologist would be.
Dreaming Ceylon
Released in 2020, Dreaming Ceylon is the most straightforwardly seductive thing in the line, and probably the easiest entry point into it.
It opens with bergamot and white pepper — the pepper doing most of the work, sharpening what would otherwise be a conventional citrus start. The heart is black tea and jasmine: not iced tea, not a tea-flavoured cologne, but the smell of leaves that have just met hot water, with the faint bitterness that comes off the steam. Underneath sit vetiver, patchouli, white amber and soft woods, which keep the tea from evaporating into pleasantness and give it something to rest on.
The reference is to the highland plantations of Sri Lanka, and the composition is unashamedly a daydream rather than a document. What makes it work is restraint. A tea note is easy to overplay, and the temptation with a travel theme is to pile on spice until the whole thing turns into a bazaar. Dreaming Ceylon does neither. It stays quiet, warm and slightly smoky as it dries down, and it wears far better than its modest price suggests.
For a perfumer who spent years being told how to play his parts, there is something fitting about a fragrance this controlled. Nobody is directing this one.