The Woman Behind the Scent
Isabelle Ramsay-Brackstone has been the perfumer at Lili Bermuda since 2004. She trained under master perfumers, a French nose and an Italian nose, who taught her the language of scent. What she has done with that language is entirely her own.
She tells the story of Bermuda.
Not a postcard version of it. Not a curated snapshot. The real thing: the way spring smells of freesia and fresh dewy air, alive with the particular restlessness of a new season. The way summer hangs heavy with white flowers, intoxicating, warm, the kind of air you want to stay inside of. The way fall comes in with hurricane winds and community, and the Island stands, as it always has. The way winter settles into spice and stillness.
But Bermuda's story is not only found in nature. It is found in the music that carries over the water on a summer night. In the laughter around a bonfire on the beach. In the particular feeling of a cocktail on Hamilton harbor when the day has been good and the light is golden. In the joie de vivre of an island that knows how to live.
This is what a perfumer listens for. This is what Isabelle translates into fragrance.
Coral, her first creation for Lili Bermuda, broke away from the single-flower tradition and reached for something larger: the ocean, the blooms, the fruity notes, the light of a Bermuda morning. Golden Hour, her most recent, captures a moment she knows well, that exquisite pause before sunset, when the light goes liquid and everything feels possible.
Her fragrances are happy, luminous, and unpretentious. Just like Bermuda itself, they are beautiful at every angle.
Every Lili Bermuda fragrance carries a piece of this Island's story: its beauty, its spirit, its resilience, its grace.
She blends each one by hand at Stewart Hall, a 300-year-old house in the heart of St. George's. She is one perfumer in a long line of perfumers who have tended this Perfumery. She will not be the last.
The fragrances will outlive her. And that, she says, is exactly as it should be.
