Vanesha Majithia Is Changing What Luxury Smells Like in India

In a market that worships familiarity, Vanesha Majithia came home to Ahmedabad and built something India had never quite seen: a fragrance house that curates the world's most uncompromising scents and asks its customers to trust her completely. So far, they are.

Vanesha Majithia will tell you that the idea for Luvih was not born in a single moment of clarity. But if you insist on her, there is one thing she keeps coming back to, standing in a concept store in New York on a quiet weekend afternoon, smelling something deliberately strange, something that made no attempt to be liked, and realizing that this refusal was the most interesting thing she had ever encountered in a bottle.

She was working at Estée Lauder at the time. She is a Columbia graduate, a neuroscience undergraduate from Emory, and someone who has trained herself to look at systems and understand how they work from the inside. The job gave her exactly that- the interior logic of how beauty brands are built and how emotion is packaged and positioned and sold at scale. She was good at it. She was also spending her weekends in places like Le Labo and Aesop, not buying anything, just being there, in spaces where fragrance was treated as a point of view rather than a product. The contrast between those two worlds did not escape her. It sharpened into something she could not unfeel.

She moved back to India and looked at the fragrance landscape with that sharpness intact. What she saw was a market built almost entirely on familiarity, like designer names, mass-market bottles, two categories, and nothing in between. The world she had been quietly inhabiting in New York, niche perfumery with genuine aesthetic conviction and a willingness to be unlikeable, did not exist here in any recognizable form. It was a gap so large she could not look away from it. When she told people around her what she was planning to build, she got polite confusion. Most of them simply did not have a frame for it, but she followed her heart.

Luvih was launched digitally, self-funded, with Vanesha in full creative and operational control. Its proposition is both simple and uncompromising- true luxury is a curation, not abundance. Every fragrance on the platform has earned its place through a selection process she describes as layered and, with a hint of amusement, a little obsessive. She begins wide, moving through sometimes entire collections just to understand a brand's language. The first pass is instinctive. Whatever makes her pause goes forward. Then she lives with the shortlist, wearing things on different days, in different moods, returning to them over weeks. The question she keeps asking is not whether she likes something. It is whether she keeps thinking about it when it is no longer on her skin. Only a few make it through.

Or Cashmere from Uermi is the kind of find that exemplifies what she is looking for. You approach it expecting warmth and softness, expecting it to behave the way its name promises. It is instead more gourmand, richer, and more textured, quietly contradicting every expectation. That small refusal to be predictable is the quality she will always choose over easy beauty. The Antiqua compositions do something similar but more confrontational- florals that arrive dry and slightly smoky where you expected something romantic, that make people say they do not know how they feel yet, and then pull those same people back again and again. She does not find this troubling. She finds it the most interesting thing a fragrance can do. Comfort, she believes, is the least interesting thing to sell.

The trust problem is real, and she does not minimize it. She is asking someone to spend significantly more than they would on a name they recognize, on a fragrance from a house they have never heard of, for a scent they cannot experience until it is actually on their skin. There is no workaround for the fundamental intangibility of what she sells. Her answer has been to build around the gap rather than pretend it is not there- curation precise enough to function as a guarantee, storytelling that helps someone imagine how a fragrance will feel before they have felt it, and consistency delivered quietly over time until trust becomes the default. Every introduction Luvih makes is built on this logic. Uermi came in alongside Baro Art. L'eau Maliz arrived with Scarlett House. Antiqua with uncut jewelry.

The most unexpectedly beautiful thing she has smelled recently is Chapter 3 Church Bells from L'eau Maliz. Mineral, almost metallic, with a current of soft incense running underneath it, cool and spacious and yet quietly warm, sitting in a register she struggles to name because it does not belong to any existing category. It arrives like air moving through a particular kind of space. OH Denim from Uermi surprised her differently. Tuberose, which is usually bold and emphatic and dressed up, is placed instead in a completely casual context, a little green, a touch of spice, and a musky woody base that softens it into something worn-in, like a floral that has been faded into fabric over months. In both cases, what moves her is the same thing: a note taken entirely out of its expected setting and made to feel different but completely natural.

She thinks a lot about what growing up in India does to how you smell the world, and she believes the effect is real even if it goes largely unnamed. Scent in India is not subtle. It is layered and constant and emotionally loaded-incense, spices, temple flowers, festival food, all of it present and overlapping from childhood. The comfort with intensity and complexity that builds from that immersion is something she does not think can be fully replicated by someone who grew up without it. Notes that might feel overwhelming elsewhere feel like home here. But New York gave her the other register, restraint and the power of what is deliberately withheld, and her taste now lives between those two places. So does Luvih's.

She sees the niche fragrance consumer in India forming in real time, and what interests her is that they are almost never arriving from a fragrance-first perspective. They come from fashion, from design, from art, from hospitality. They have an aesthetic sensibility already, and fragrance becomes its extension. They may not know the technical vocabulary, but they know exactly what they are drawn to and, perhaps more importantly, what they are not. She can feel a shift happening beneath the surface, away from wearing fragrance for recognition and toward wearing it for self-expression. From what is this, toward this feels like me.

India's own fragrance heritage is something she speaks about with a particular mixture of pride and frustration. The tradition is ancient and sophisticated: attar from Kannauj, hydrodistillation, and raw materials of extraordinary quality. And yet for decades the Indian consumer reached instinctively for the international name. She understands why. International fragrance was positioned as aspirational, as imagery, and as modern luxury in a form that felt globally legible. Attar remained embedded in ritual and culture but was never translated for a contemporary audience. The storytelling gap was the real problem. The heritage was always there. The framing was missing.

The ingredient she would most want to place in the global niche perfumery conversation is mitti attar- the scent of the first rain on dry earth. It is not pretty. It is earthy and raw and mineral. But it does not feel like an interpretation of anything. It feels like a memory. She believes the global fragrance conversation has not yet understood what it could do with that.

Luxury, in her definition, is a fragrance that is not trying to be liked by everyone. One that has not been softened or adjusted to maximize its appeal and that is allowed to be exactly what it is without needing to explain itself. It is also about time: how much went into making it and how much the wearer is willing to give it in return. And it is about specificity. The most luxurious thing you can wear is something that does not feel interchangeable, something that is, in some way that cannot be entirely explained, yours.

In five years she wants Luvih to feel sharper, not larger. More defined, more experiential, and more global in reach but more precise in perspective. She admires Victoria Beckham for exactly this quality- the discipline to evolve without diluting, to become more exactly yourself over time rather than more accommodating. Curation will remain at the center. Scale for its own sake is not part of the plan.

What she would feel if an Indian niche perfumery house entered the global conversation alongside Byredo or Le Labo or Frederic Malle is not something she describes as pride. She calls it momentum. Because once that happens, once an Indian house becomes part of that vocabulary rather than an interesting exception to it, it stops being anomalous and starts being the beginning of something. Other voices come through. Other interpretations. The door, once opened, stays open. That, she says, is what would matter most.

She is not waiting for validation. She is waiting for the moment an Indian fragrance house sits in the same conversation as Byredo or Le Labo and nobody finds it surprising. Not because of what it would mean for Luvih. Because of what it would mean for everyone who comes after. The door, once opened, stays open. That is what she is actually building toward.

www.luvih.com