Fragrance house

Paraphrase

Paraphrase traces its origins to Libertine Fragrance, which Joshua Smith started in late 2014 while studying design. The business grew from Smith’s experiments with essential-oil mixtures and early sales at a University of Alberta popup market, alongside his transition from forestry studies into industrial design. Smith remains the brand’s founder, owner and primary scent maker, and Paraphrase approaches perfume as a sensory and emotional practice rooted in personal experience, storytelling and the contradictions of being human. Its fragrances are presented as unisex, with sensory pleasure placed ahead of perfume as an identity marker. In July 2024, Libertine Fragrance announced that it would become Paraphrase in 2025 after trademark-related legal issues; the change was completed by January 2025 and accompanied a move toward themes of building, community and retelling personal stories through scent. In 2020, Sex & Jasmine and Gilded were among Libertine Fragrance’s three top sellers at Ministry of Scent.