There is a moment, in every serious perfume, when the smell stops being a smell and becomes a place. Johan Bergelin understood this because he understood it first as a painter, a photographer, and a musician — someone who had spent decades asking how experience could be held in a form before he ever asked that question about a bottle. He founded 19-69 in 2015, on a kitchen table, with 500 euros. The first five fragrances launched at Colette in Paris and sold out within minutes.

From Coca-Cola TVC campaigns to curating for Tom Ford and La Mer from Bangkok, Mirelle Phachareeya Grünert moves between cultures with precision and philosophy. She doesn't aspire to be better than other creators — just better today than she was yesterday.

Andrew Salgado reads two or three books at a time. He starts with Baudelaire when searching for imagery, follows it with Derek Jarman's account of building a garden while dying of HIV, and finishes with Susan Orlean on obsession and the pursuit of beauty. Then he goes into the studio and starts a painting that may take a year, beginning with a title jotted in a notebook. He is also one of the UK's leading figurative painters, with fifteen sold-out solo exhibitions and a piece at Phillips New York that sold for five times its estimate. He is equally vocal about all of this.