After more than 15 years working on the branding and consulting side of the fashion and beauty world, collaborating with clients ranging from Alexander Wang to Loeffler Randall, the New York–based entrepreneur Brianna Lipovsky is taking the reins with the launch of her own fragrance company, Maison d’Etto, and with a splash: Her debut collection, available online and through The Future Perfect, includes five gender-neutral scents—tested on hundreds of users representing a spectrum of races, skin types, and genders—that buck longstanding norms shaped by a his-and-hers mentality. “I wanted to take all the rules of beauty and fragrance, smash them down, and say no. I’m on the millennial cusp, and the whole idea of gendered scent to me just seems so archaic and dated,” she says. “The opportunity I saw was to create this moment for human connection through a product.”

Also a mother, competitive equestrian, and once a pre-med hopeful who, in another lifetime, took three years off to enroll in a post-bac program at Hunter College, the fashion veteran has found an unlikely way to find common ground for these different dimensions of her life through fragrance—a world that blends science, nature, and intuition. “One of my favorite subjects was organic chemistry, so I like getting into the science of everything, which would sometimes scare the perfumers,” she says. “Some of them would try to make sexual analogies about mixing the different scents, like, ‘The scents need to take time, they need to make love…’ and I would say, ‘Can you just tell me about the scientific reaction happening here?’” Chemistry aside, Lipvosky cites an “animalic” passion at the core of her new career: “Scent is such an intuitive thing. It should be primal, guttural; a direct reaction in how it makes you feel. This was about tapping into that and keeping myself as pure and as reactionary as I could be, without getting too into my own head.”