Skip to content 
The exciting answer for what to gift valued guests of one’s wedding is, naturally, a custom scent. A dear friend of Serviette and muse of our debut campaign, Laura Bannister, a writer and publisher of an out-of-print book on the late Italian furniture darling Gaetano Pesce, married her beau, the musician Teddy Powell, in a courthouse wedding on July 2. To commemorate their union, Serviette made a custom fragrance. Let us step inside the process.
The wedded pair met with perfumer Trey Taylor over several sessions, where it was determined which notes were ravishing and which were revolting. Smelling sketches—draft formulas that have been lolling about in Serviette’s archival coffers—became the basis of discovering mutual likes and dislikes. After finishing this scent consultation, it was determined that their shared affections include tobacco, rose, bergamot, patchouli and olibanum. A dream lineup!
From there, Taylor worked to create mods—modifications—of a certain dry citrus formula that stood out, with notes of blood orange, tobacco, and cypriol. Samples were provided for the couple to complete a wear test, which is a fancy way of saying trying it on skin to see how it smells over time. The finalized formula was reached after only three mods, and was compounded and left to mature for four weeks before being filtered and bottled into vials that were designed by Bannister’s creative director sibling, Matthew Roland Bannister, and screen printed in Pennsylvania by A Small Boat Press ahead of the big day.
The scent got its name from Gunsmoke, the iconic American television Western that aired on CBS from 1955 to 1975, which the wedded duo enjoys watching together. The official notes list is as follows. Top: green mandarin, bergamot, black pepper. Middle: lasso rope, hay, tuberose, jasmine. Base: sawdust, amber, burnt sugar, patchouli. To read notes and to guess how it smells are, as we know, two very different things. Much like a Spaghetti Western, it smells dusty and dry with an underlying punch of full-bodied green mandarin and indolic florals, all tapered into a gorgeous cypriol heart and base of copaiba balsam.
It was a crowdpleaser, and a pleasure to be included in such an important day. Many returns to the happy couple.