Mind Games

Mind Games is a niche fragrance house built around the game of chess, founded in 2022 by the husband-and-wife pair Alex and Mariana Shalbaf [4][5]. It is the in-house brand of The Fragrance Group, a company that licenses and distributes scents for houses such as Tumi, Bentley, Brioni and Lalique; Alex Shalbaf serves as the group's chief executive, while Mariana Shalbaf is creative director of Mind Games [4]. The line is unisex and positioned at the luxury end of the market, with each fragrance conceived around a chess idea — an opening, a sacrifice, a decisive move.

The brand presents itself as an attempt to make niche perfumery more intellectual: the Shalbafs set out to translate the strategy and precision of chess into a collection of scents crafted by master perfumers. Mind Games is registered in the United States as Mind Games Fragrances, LLC [7], and its press materials carry a New York dateline. The house remains active, with new fragrances released as recently as July 2025 [5].

Mind Games was created in 2022 by Alex and Mariana Shalbaf. The couple already worked in fragrance through The Fragrance Group, which licenses and distributes perfumes for established luxury labels, and conceived Mind Games as the group's own brand rather than a licensed one. According to Robb Report, personal memories led the Shalbafs to consider how they might offer "a more intellectual form of luxury fragrances," and chess became the organising idea — its tactics, pacing and sense of consequence mapped onto perfume composition [4].

The brand's own account leans on the symbolism of the board. Mind Games describes its work as linking "the complex artistry best embodied by the strategy and brilliance of Chess, with the innovative and hypnotic effects of perfumery," with each scent meant to mirror the significance of a player's moves. Its stated tagline is "Make your next move, with a brand that seduces the mind."

Mind Games is wholly the in-house brand of The Fragrance Group, which creates, distributes and licenses luxury fragrances internationally and handles marketing and distribution for artisanal fragrance partners. The two are linked at the top: Alex Shalbaf is chief executive of The Fragrance Group, and his role as co-founder of Mind Games places the brand directly within the group's portfolio alongside the licensed names it represents [4].

Mind Games is a unisex, chess-themed niche house that frames each fragrance as a conceptual piece tied to a moment of play. The company says its scents are "precisely calculated by master perfumers who value the heat of the play above neutrality," and the line is divided into "dark" and "light" scents housed in correspondingly black and white bottles [6]. Fragrances are organised into themed collections, including the Artisan Collection, the Soulmate Collection — which the brand frames around the pawns as "the soul of the game" — and the Perfumer Extraordinaire collection.

The brand sits at a luxury price point; its 2025 Kingside and Queenside releases were priced at 475 US dollars for 100 millilitres [5]. Distribution is through high-end department stores and specialist perfumeries: Mind Games states availability at Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman and Selfridges, among other retailers [5].

The house does not run an in-house perfumery; instead it works with the fragrance house Symrise and its perfumers, who compose the scents from selected raw materials. Mind Games says it partners with Symrise "and their world-renowned master perfumers" to craft long-lasting, individually distinguished fragrances [1].

Among its named scents, Checkmate launched in 2022, composed by perfumer David Apel [8], and Gambit followed in 2023, created by Carlos Viñals [9]. The collection grew through further chess-named releases such as French Defense and Queening, and by 2025 the brand described itself as spanning three fragrance lines plus a home collection. That year it added two extrait de parfum, Kingside and Queenside, to the Perfumer Extraordinaire collection; Kingside is built around notes including pistachio, cardamom, grapefruit, tonka bean and peru balsam, and Queenside around pear, cassis, lily of the valley, violet and oakmoss [5]. The trademark holder, Mind Games Fragrances, LLC, has registered a wide set of chess-derived names — among them Castling, Grand Master and Scholar's Mate.

Mind Games names sustainability as a foundational value and ties much of its environmental claim to its supplier. The company says it holds its trade and labour practices to a high ethical standard and limits production to reduce strain on natural resources, and it points to Symrise's record — noting that the fragrance house has been awarded Platinum status by the EcoVadis rating agency.

As a brand founded in 2022, Mind Games has drawn coverage in fragrance and lifestyle media. Robb Report profiled the house and its founders in 2024 in a feature on how it creates "intellectual" niche fragrances, and Cultured Magazine ran a February 2024 piece on its chess-as-strategy approach to choosing a signature scent [10]. Fragrantica covered the brand at its 2022 debut, describing it as new that year and noting its dark-and-light collection structure.

Mind Games is active. Its most recent publicly documented activity is the July 2025 launch of the Kingside and Queenside fragrances, by which point the brand reported three fragrance lines and a home collection and a retail presence spanning US department stores and international perfumeries.