World of Perfume
Twenty-five years in beauty and luxury taught Catherine Laskine-Balandina what she didn't want to build. State of Mind is what she built instead.
Twenty-Five Years Before the First Bottle
Catherine Laskine-Balandina spent twenty-five years inside the beauty and luxury industry before she started her own house. That much time inside an industry tends to teach you exactly what you don't want to repeat, and for her, that was the standardization and globalization that had settled over perfume and luxury retail.
State of Mind, launched in Versailles, was her answer: a house built around a synesthetic idea rather than a category, and a universe she describes as entirely her own to author.
Art Deco, Versailles, and a Slavic Sense of Beauty
Three things she names as her own influences show up across the house. Her love of French elegance and style became the Art Deco language the brand still uses everywhere, from the bottles to the Olfactory Tea Room in Versailles, where the house keeps its roots.
Her Slavic origin gave her something less visible but just as central: a holistic view of beauty, driven by an inner sense rather than a formula, and a need to express that through scent she describes as limitless. Add a life spent traveling, which she calls a real part of who she is, and her reading of different cultures becomes part of the brand's own DNA.
She keeps two proverbs close, one from China and one from Japan. One calls tea a fragrance you drink. The other calls it "qi", the flow that runs through everything alive. Both land on the same idea the house is built on: tea and perfume, read together, as one sense rather than two.
Creator & Founder
Catherine Laskine-Balandina
- Background
- 25 years in beauty and luxury
- Influences
- French elegance and Art Deco, Slavic heritage, a life spent traveling
- Philosophy
- A "can do" belief in doing things, and doing them well
A Project That Needed More Than One Person
Catherine has said that building State of Mind's synesthetic universe took believing in herself in whatever she did, and finding pleasure in doing it well. It also took more than one person. To turn the idea into something real, she called on a perfumer, a tea master, and two illustrators.
Together, they're the small creative team behind everything the house makes, each working in a different discipline, all answering to the same starting idea.
Karine Dubreuil-Sereni
Perfumer
Trained in Grasse at the Roure school, now in-house at L'Occitane and collaborating with Takasago.
Olivier Scala
Tea Master
Fifth-generation tea importer, leading George Cannon Tea since 1988, presiding over the French Committee for Tea, and founder of the Paris Tea Festival in 2005.
Elena Minenko
Illustrator
Trained in classical art in Kiev and fashion illustration in Barcelona, now working from Brussels for clients including Hermès and Vogue.
Kasiq Jungwoo Lee
Illustrator
Based on Jeju Island in Korea, with fashion illustration work for Nordstrom, Samsung and Volkswagen. He also created the artwork for Ed Sheeran's Divide album.
The clearest way to see what all four of them built together is still the fragrances themselves. The Discovery Kit holds all fourteen. Karine's own path through the collection, tea by tea, is told in full in The Perfumer Behind State of Mind.
One idea. Four collaborators to build it right.
