The JYCTY Story

I think scent found me long before I knew what it was doing.

When I was a kid visiting family in New York, I used to run up and down the long apartment hallways. Every door seemed to hold a different world. Cooking, perfume, laundry, wood, spice, old carpet, something sweet, something warm. All of it drifted into the hallway and somehow became one scent of its own.

I loved that smell.

At the time, I never thought about why.

Years later, I caught something in the air that brought it all back in an instant.

The hallway.

The apartments.

The excitement of being in New York.

And I realized I had been searching for that scent for years without even knowing it.

That was the first time I really understood what fragrance could do.

It could hold a place.

A person.

A moment.

An entire piece of your life.

That fascination stayed with me.

When I was older, my friends and I would pass around a bottle of Drakkar Noir before a camp dance until the whole cabin smelled of it. Again, scent became part of the moment. The anticipation. The confidence. The feeling that something was about to happen.

Then years later, I smelled Baccarat Rouge 540 for the first time.

It stopped me.

I had loved fragrance for most of my life, but I had never smelled anything quite like it. I wanted to know why.

So I started experimenting.

There was no studio. No grand plan. I was working my regular job from home and making perfume in my bedroom with a setup that was crude, improvised, and somehow worked.

I made a lot of mistakes.

Too much material. Too much intensity. Too much impatience.

Perfumery taught me restraint.

It taught me to wait.

To come back to a formula days later.

To understand that sometimes the best thing you can do is stop touching it and let it become itself.

Then came the moments where something clicked.

A material suddenly made sense.

A blend finally came alive.

An idea that had only existed in my head appeared in the bottle.

One of those ideas became Strong Silent Type.

It is still my signature scent. I wear it almost every day, and in a way I cannot fully explain, it feels like me.

Simple. Strong. Quiet. Familiar.

And I am still changing it.

I keep creating new versions, pushing one part forward, pulling another back, seeing how far the idea can go. It is a simple structure with so many possibilities, which is probably why I have never really been able to leave it alone.

It was one of the first fragrances that made me feel I had created something genuinely my own.

Then came Yorkville.

And somewhere along the way, the question changed from:

“How did they make this?”

to:

“What would I make?”

That is when JYCTY truly became mine.

Toronto naturally became part of the story. I love this city, its neighbourhoods, its personalities, its little worlds within worlds. Creating fragrances for places like Yorkville, Leslieville, Trinity Bellwoods and the Junction became my way of turning those places into scent.

But the part that still affects me most is when one of my fragrances leaves me.

Sometimes I smell something I created on another person.

Something that once existed only in my head is suddenly part of someone else's life.

And maybe, years from now, they will smell something similar and be taken back to a night, a person, a place they had almost forgotten.

The same way I was taken back to those hallways in New York.

That is still the magic I am chasing.

I started as a kid running through hallways, unknowingly collecting smells and memories.

I am still doing the same thing.

I just know what I am looking for now.

Jason Feldman
Head Perfumer, JYCTY