Manos Gerakinis Parfums

Manos Gerakinis Parfums was founded in 2014 by Manos Gerakinis, who is still its creative director, and it calls itself the first niche luxury perfume house of Greece. He grew up in Kavala in northern Greece, in a family with roots in Istanbul, and spent more than a decade in London working in luxury retail before he came home to Greece in 2012. A 2017 profile in Greek City Times describes the house as based in Athens. It began with Sillage Royal, a perfume he first had made for himself.

Its scents draw on what he smelled as a child: roses, saffron, tobacco, labdanum and honey. Each perfume is made in Greece with plant-based alcohol, and the house says it uses no animal-derived materials. It works with named perfumers, among them Chris Maurice on Methexis, which won a Fragrance Foundation UK award in 2023. For its tenth anniversary it released Sillage X, a vetiver scent named after the first perfume.

Manos Gerakinis Parfums has no shop of its own. In Athens its store list names the Grande Bretagne Gift Shop on Syntagma Square; elsewhere in Greece it lists Vault 5 in Kalamata and two shops on Santorini, Comment Boutique in Oia and the Sandblu Resort Boutique in Kamari. A 100 ml bottle from the Private Collection costs €240, and Immortelle costs from €100. Try Immortelle first: it is built around a flower that grows wild in Greece, given a sweet halo of brown sugar, milk and spice.