SOMENS

SOMENS, also written Somens and presented online as Somens Barcelona, is a niche perfume house based in Barcelona, Spain [2]. Its fragrances are built around stories of migration and cultural exchange: in the company's telling, each scent in its first range is tied to a movement of people across continents and to the mix of cultures that followed. Rather than relying on a single in-house nose, it works with several outside perfumers, and its catalogue has grown to around nine perfumes released between 2020 and 2024.

The brand's current status is unknown. Its perfumes were still sold by specialist retailers in 2026 and a Spanish fashion magazine featured one of them in 2025, but the official website could not be reached in October 2026 and no brand-side activity from the preceding twelve months has been documented.

Somens does not state a founding year. The earliest perfumes attributed to it, Arena, Aria, Jade and Seda, carry 2020 release dates in the Parfumo fragrance database [4], which suggests the first launches date from that year. When the company itself was set up is not documented.

The brand's own story centres on Georgina Ripollès, a Barcelona-born publicist who goes by the nickname Gio L'Arôme: "Gio" as a short form of her name, "L'Arôme" for her passion for creating fragrances. The perfume retailer Parfinity names her as the founder of Somens [3], and the company's "Our Story" page presents the brand as "a reflection of Gio's knowledge, love and passion for life". That page is not entirely consistent, however. A separate team section on it lists an Anthony Moore as founder and chief executive, alongside a creative director and a sales director, names that do not otherwise appear in published material about the brand [1].

According to the company, Ripollès was born in Barcelona in 1975 into the Ripollès Segarra family of editors and publicists. Her grandfather worked as an editor, and the family went on to set up one of the first advertising agencies in Barcelona in 1960 [1], producing campaigns, copy and design for Spanish publishers such as Planeta, Salvat and Círculo de Lectores. The brand calls her the third generation of a family "devoted to turning words into art", a line of work that, as it tells the story, eventually led to cosmetics and perfume.

Ripollès studied advertising and public relations at university in Barcelona, then spent five years in Paris working for technology companies. She has said she spent Sunday mornings in museums there, and the company dates her deeper study of cultures, oils, essences and perfume to those Paris years. She has also described living in several African countries, which she connects to a lifelong interest in anthropology and in people. Back in Barcelona, her family turned its experience toward creating brands for clients, from packaging design through to the finished product.

Somens describes Ripollès as a publicist who specialises in building cosmetic and perfume brands and credits her with more than twenty perfume brands and 164 perfumes [1]. These are the company's own figures; no independent account of them has been published.

The company names Arena as its first perfume and says its story began with the Reminiscence range, a set of scents meant to let each wearer find a connection to a memory, whether an old one, a recent one or one tied to the person they are becoming. Arena, Aria, Jade and Seda formed the core of that range. Further releases followed at roughly yearly intervals: Capriccio and Onice in 2021, Liberty 2022 in 2022, Atlantis in 2023 and Éclair in 2024, according to Parfumo's listing.

The product line has not always been limited to scent. Early versions of the brand's website, from around 2021, also carried skincare pages, including anti-ageing products, a daily moisturiser, cleansing products and eye and lip contour care, alongside a Spanish-language section. By 2024 the site's menu was organised around perfume alone, with the Reminiscence and Legends collections, a Discovery Set, and pages about the brand's story and its perfumers.

In autumn 2024 Somens exhibited at the TFWA World Exhibition & Conference, a trade fair held at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes from 29 September to 3 October, according to a post the brand shared on its website [1]. In June 2025 the Spanish edition of Marie Claire included Onice in a feature on Spanish perfumes, the most recent dated press coverage of the brand.

Somens frames perfume as a way of telling stories about people rather than as a set of scent families. The company describes itself as "a synonym of people, art and passion for cultures" and says it grew out of the wish to explain human origins, and how people became who they are today, through the history of perfume. Childhood memories, particular places and the movement of people recur throughout its own descriptions.

The name carries the same idea. According to the brand, SOMENS joins three parts: SO from Sophie, standing for wisdom; M from Mundial, the Spanish word for "world"; and ENS, a phonetic rendering of "essence" [1].

The company also presents its outlook as borderless, saying the brand has no limits of geography and that it sees everyone as equal, without prejudice. It describes its products as luxury perfumes intended to stir nostalgia for one's roots, and says they are inspired by perfumers from around the world working with fine materials. Parfinity, which classifies Somens as a niche brand, sums up the working model as a platform on which several perfumers turn stories into fragrance.

Somens makes fragrance; no other current product category is documented. In its first collection, Reminiscence, each perfume stands for a historical migration, as the company describes them.

Arena, the first, links Arabic culture with the Iberian Peninsula. The brand attaches to it a story in which perfume itself was "born" when Spain blended essential oils into leather, and says Louis XIV wanted Spanish leather for its balanced, addictive smell [1]. This is a heritage narrative offered by the company rather than a documented history of the scent. Aria, composed by the perfumer Chris Maurice, recalls the entrepreneurs and artisans who left Western Europe for North and South America during the 19th and 20th centuries. Seda, by Daniel Josier, represents the movement of talented, curious young people from the cities of West Africa and India to Europe's major cities. Jade is presented as "pure nature", standing for Asian cultures that settled in South America and Europe.

The later releases are described by retailers more in terms of their scent than their story. Parfinity characterises Capriccio as fruity and citrus, Éclair as a gourmand blend of lemon and vanilla, Atlantis as a pairing of strawberry and leather, Arena as woody and spicy with oud, and Onice as spicy and woody. Parfumo's coverage describes Éclair as a citrus, gourmand unisex perfume built around Parisian elegance and romance.

Two of the brand's perfumers come from perfumery families. Chris Maurice is the professional name of Christian Carbonnel, whom Parfinity describes as the third generation of a Spanish perfumery family. Lucas Sieuzac, who created Onice [2], is the son of the French perfumer Jean-Louis Sieuzac. Daniel Josier, the third named collaborator, is a Spanish perfumer.

In June 2025 the journalist Anna Pardo included Onice in a Marie Claire Spain feature on Spanish fresh and floral perfumes, which argued that Spanish houses could now stand alongside French and Italian ones. The magazine described the scent as fresh, refined and clearly inspired by summer, and called it "another national gem" that belongs on the radar of anyone who loves sophisticated perfumery [2].

On the fragrance database Parfumo, users had submitted 372 ratings of the brand's perfumes as of October 2026, averaging 7.7 out of 10 [4]. Capriccio, Atlantis and Arena were the most frequently rated.

The status of Somens is unknown, and the available signals point in different directions. In October 2026 the official website, somensbarcelona.com, did not respond. At the same time, the retailer Parfinity still listed seven Somens perfumes: Capriccio, Éclair, Atlantis, Arena, Jade, Seda and Onice [3]. The latest dated activity by the brand itself is its appearance at the Cannes trade fair in autumn 2024, and the latest dated press coverage is the Marie Claire Spain feature of June 2025. On that evidence the brand cannot be described as either clearly active or dormant. No parent company is known.