Fragrance house

Neandertal

Founded in 2015 by London-based Japanese artist Kentaro Yamada, Neandertal began as an art project rooted in contemporary-art practice rather than as a conventional perfume brand. Yamada uses fragrance to question humanity’s egocentric view of the universe and to examine human experience across past, present, and future. The brand’s visual language centers on bottle forms modeled on Norfolk flint handaxes, first realized in ceramic and later translated into glass through 3D scanning. Yamada and perfumer Euan McCall worked for about two years on Dark and Light, the project’s initial fragrance pair, which explores the impermanence and rise and fall of species, cultures, and civilisations. The subsequent Us and Them collection extended that conceptual approach to belonging, identity, borders, and the historical encounter between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. In 2025, Neandertal introduced Is and Was, a pair examining the relationship between human perfumery and machine creativity: one was developed by Symrise’s AI system and the other by a master-perfumer-led team, with both identities intentionally undisclosed.