Chronotope’s Newest Perfumes →

Neon Series perfumes are each built to feature a single natural material that has been stretched to its most vivid olfactive and thematic limit.

A note from the perfumer

Hi, I’m Carter, and I’m glad you’ve found Chronotope—

A story-driven, artisan perfumery that I launched in 2020 after a decade of preparation. It’s been a privilege to share my work with fragrance enthusiasts around the world in the years since, and a joy to watch as my perfumes have earned a reputation for expanding their wearers’ understanding and expectations of the kinds of smells, materials combinations, and stories that perfumery is capable of portraying as a medium. Many have even claimed Chronotope’s perfumes provide deeply personal, emotionally moving experiences.

I hope they’ll move you, too.

—Carter Weeks Maddox,
Founder & Nose @ Chronotope

Chronotope’s Core Collection →

Seven perfumes, including four inspired by the perfumer’s own life and three inspired by the lives and work of admired others, that celebrate the human body—in particular, the experiences we live in it and the emotions we feel through it.

Chronotope’s Perfumes Are…

Gender-Affirming

Even when I dedicate a perfume to a person of a specific gender, I design each and every concept to be worn directly on the skin of anybody who occupies a human body.

Contemplative & “Slow“

Most modern perfumes are designed to “wow” customers in a mass-market retail setting. And as such, only their top notes, which completely evaporate within 5-10 minutes after application, are designed to impress. After that, they often dry down to generic-smelling woody ambers and vague musks that smell rather indistinctive. I frankly loathe this style of perfumery, began making perfume in the first place because of how much I disliked it, and I even believe it’s the culprit for what has become a common complaint about perfume: that “everything smells the same anymore.”

So I don’t design perfumes like that—not ever. Instead, I design Chronotope’s perfumes to reveal themselves like ever-unfolding labyrinths. My perfumes dry down slowly over the course of the day and gradually unfurl new materials and aspects of themselves over their many hours of wear. This, I hope, offers their wearers something different than they can find elsewhere—as well as ample opportunities throughtout their otherwise busy, hectic days to smash the proverbial “pause” button, breathe a bit, and then re-emerge from their private moment of respite feeling refreshed, stimulated, & rejuvenated so they can continue onward toward the remainder of their day.

100% Handmade in Small Batches

From concepting to materials acquisition; from formulation to compounding; from designing labels to sourcing prints; from filtering to bottling; from sealing, labeling, and boxing to shrink-wrapping, addressing and shipping, I’ve produced every single unit of any product that Chronotope has ever sold entirely by myself from my small perfume lab and studio based in Winter Park, FL, where I blend and macerate each finished perfume in no larger than half-gallon batches at a time. This micro-batching process enables me to take great care to see that each bottle of perfume that leaves my studio is one I can be proud of.

And I’d have it no other way, as I believe this sort of attention to detail and to craft is—for a product customers who purchase bottles will spend hundreds and even thousands of hours wearing directly on their skin—the only suitable approach. Perfume is always personal to its wearer. At Chronotope, we believe it should be equally personal to its producer, too.

IFRA-Compliant & Skin-Safe

We take care to ensure that every raw material we use in our perfumes is dosed at skin-safe levels to comply with the most current IFRA (International Fragrance Association) regulations, and when new IFRA guidelines are published with updates to existing max limits, we gladly adjust our fragrances’ formulae accordingly.

Uniquely Signed, Original Artworks

No two bottles of Chronotope’s perfumes will ever be exactly the same—and that’s not due to an inconsistency of the liquid perfume inside the bottles. Rather, it’s because each bottle is marked with a symbol that only I can provide: most frequently an impression of my right thumbprint, which I stamp directly onto the majority of products’ labels; however, a bit less often, the unique mark is either my actual signature or an original design that I developed and draw by hand directly onto the labels.

Special Release Perfumes →

Temporary offerings—either because the perfume contains rare or otherwise cost-prohibitive natural materials, which may be impossible to source sustainably more than once, or because we created the fragrance with the express intention of producing it in limited quantities.