The founder
It started in high school. I found a bottle of Aqua di Gio somewhere in the back of the garage. Nobody in the house knew whose it was, so I kept it.
I wore it to school one day and my crush turned to me and said "ooo, what's that?" From that moment on, she always associated that scent with me. I was completely sold. There's something to this, I thought. Fragrance isn't just a smell — it's a signal. It's the thing people remember about you before they remember anything else.
Then the bottle ran out, and my interest went on hiatus for years.
I eventually found my way back to fragrance through TikTok — which, as it turns out, is a terrible place to learn about fragrance. I blind bought a weird cupid scent that smelled like straight cotton candy, and a chocolate one that genuinely made me feel sick. I bought an Amber Oud Gold Edition after some video swore it was the "absolute panty dropper" — I hated it. It gave me a headache.
Every purchase was a gamble. Every bottle was a lesson I paid $50–80 to learn.
Then I googled "most expensive perfume" — the way you do when you're trying to understand what good even means in this space. Creed Aventus came up. According to the internet, it was the greatest cologne ever made. Five hundred dollars.
I couldn't justify $500 for a perfume. But I was obsessed with understanding what could possibly smell like that. I started watching YouTube videos about it. Pineapple? Birch smoke? I couldn't wrap my head around it.
That's when I fell into the clone rabbit hole — and realized entire companies had built their whole business around duping the scent at a fraction of the price. Some were incredible. Some were embarrassing. But I had no way to know which was which without buying blind all over again.
That frustration — combined with a career spent building software — pointed at an obvious problem. The information exists. The clones exist. What doesn't exist is a low-stakes way to actually test them against each other and against the original, on your own skin, before you commit to a bottle.
That's Air Decants. A curated sample of the real thing alongside every clone worth your time — enough to wear each one for a full day and decide for yourself. No influencers. No blind buys. Just your nose.