February 4, 2026 |
How do you bottle 25 years of creativity? For 10’s founder and global editor-in-chief Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou, a chance meeting with Azzi Glasser, the award-winning founder of The Perfumer’s Story, led to the creation of 10 Magazine Eau de Parfum.
The limited edition unisex fragrance, created to celebrate the 25th birthday of the magazine, drew on Neophitou’s preference for elegant, woody scents as well as her Greek heritage and memories of her mother and father. “I’ve always been obsessed with memories and smell. I wanted to create something that would remind me of this specific moment, and these 25 years of 10 magazine making its mark in the publishing world,” says Neophitou. She went back to her childhood for inspiration, mining recollections of her parents. “Creating 10 Magazine Eau de Parfum was very personal because my associations with smell have always been about memory.”
From her father’s cologne came masculine base notes of red sequoia wood, vetiver absolute and Himalayan cedarwood, which she combined with warm bright top notes of saffron, pepper and white peach, inspired by her mother. “I was trying to achieve that balance of masculine and feminine, which very much represents what we do at 10 magazine,” she says, though she admits that narrowing down her choices was overwhelming at first. “You get very confused because there are so many smells. But Azzi taught me to focus on what I felt would represent 10, and all those combined notes are like the perfect pitch.”
10 Eau de Parfum combines notes of pepper, white peach, Greek saffron, red sequoia wood, vetiver absolute and Himalayan cedarwood
She tested the first samples on herself and is fascinated by how the scent changes and evolves on the skin over time. “It’s very much a scent that warms up. It starts quite clean and fresh and, as time goes on, it develops into a much deeper smell. It is the sort of perfume that can take you from day to night. It’s not a heavy, musky smell. It always has this moment of cleanness.”
As for the bottle design, Neophitou had strong ideas. “I wanted it to be something very simplistic, something that had the air of an old aftershave bottle, like the sort you buy in a chemist, very unpretentious, very simple. It’s quite masculine, but it could be either. There’s an honesty and an authenticity to it that I love.”
Shop the fragrance here. 10+ Issue 8 – FUTURE, JUBILEE, CELEBRATION – is on newsstands December 5. Order your copy here.
10 MAGAZINE: THE FRAGRANCE
Photographer DAN MATTHEWS
Text CLAUDIA CROFT
Production AMBER BENNETT
