The first thing Chriselle Lim ever bottled was heartbreak.
When she came across the brand Phlur, then an obscure clean fragrance brand with a small following, Chriselle Lim was in the middle of a divorce. “An inconvenient time,” she says, laughing.
Lim is every bit the glossy CEO meeting with ELLE Australia in Sydney, dressed in the latest season Beare Park to celebrate Phlur’s launch into Mecca. But, she’s grown a brand predicted to exceed $150 million in US sales this year because she’s led with vulnerability.
Lim cut her teeth as one of the internet’s original fashion bloggers. Not an influencer in the 2025 sense of the word, but a writer with product nous and an instinct for what women want (often before they know they want it). In the middle of her personal emotional wreckage, Lim saw potential to build something new.
“I was in a really painful period of my life, so I was like ‘How do I create a beautiful scent when I’m not feeling beautiful?” she recalls. “How do I create something when I feel so alone and vulnerable? It was a strange request, to bottle that feeling and it did become known as the sad girl scent,” she says.
But Lim’s scent was less about pain than about craving — what she describes as “the yearning for warmth, for closeness.”
She called it Missing Person.
Missing Person is a skin scent, a newer fragrance category that has quietly dominated the last decade. The history of perfume has been about masking and altering your natural aroma, then Glossier You launched in 2017, and the no-perfume-perfume became a lust object. Smelling like you’re wearing nothing at all became as chic as looking like you’re wearing no makeup. But while You is about selfhood and personal signature, Missing Person is about longing.
It’s this concept of yearning that tapped a zeitgeist and helped Missing Person sell out, and generate a 250,000-person waitlist, before anyone had even smelt it. In the last few years, it feels like we’ve collectively remembered the delicious pleasure of longing, something absent from our instant-gratification-led, swipe-heavy culture.
Now yearning is everywhere. From Sally Rooney’s Normal People, a seminal text for the yearners, to Emerald Fennell’s pivot to films like Saltburn and soon Wuthering Heights, steeped in slow-burn desire. In 2024, Dazed declared “Everyone Is Yearning Right Now.” It concluded that longing is an act of connection, hope and imagination. All qualities that feel luxurious, sexy and rare in the current climate. These are also adjectives that could be used to describe Missing Person.
The top note of Missing Person is skin musk, rounded out by bergamot nectar and sheer jasmine, then dried down with blonde wood and sandalwood. Almost imperceptible, the scent feels more like a sensation than a smell. It leaves a warmth that, like the best scents, makes you want to draw closer: the trace of a lover left on a pillowcase, the smell of freshly showered skin on a lazy weekend morning. Intimacy you only sense when someone is proximate.
Still, Lim was doubtful it would sell. Phlur had no retail counter where customers could experience the fragrance, minimal brand presence, just Instagram and a website. “I was thinking maybe we could move ten bottles,” she says. “But we not only sold out, we had a 250,000-person waitlist, and we were sold out for six months.”
The concept of a skin scent that smelled like an absent lover resonated with hundreds of thousands of people. “We’ve all felt heartbreak before. We’ve all felt loneliness,” she says. But Missing Person isn’t just about missing someone. It’s about remembering when you felt the most loved. What I was really missing when I created it was feeling loved again.”
Spritzing a fragrance in front of its creator is always a high-risk operation. I’ve always found Glossier You a little too powdery and floral. I typically like darker, smoky scents or sticky, fruity fragrances. But there’s not much powder to Missing Person. A few minutes in, I felt a phantom warmth blossoming behind the scent that felt like being seen, or maybe held.
Lim lifts a bottle. “If Phlur were a person,” she muses, “I’d say… very emotional. Maybe a little too emotional. But also unexpected. And playful and full of depth.”
It was after Missing Person that she decided every fragrance would lead with a story and emotion. We’re seated in front of a lineup of her jewel-like eau de parfums and body sprays, each monikered with a tightly evocative two or three-line name: Apricot Privé, Not Your Baby, Father Figure. Minimal but emotive. They don’t just tell you how they smell, they tell you how you’ll feel.”
Lim’s most reached-for scent is Father Figure. “I always say I don’t have a favourite child,” she jokes. “But I do gravitate towards this one. Father Figure was inspired by me having to play both mother figure and father figure to my two girls as a single mum, during a period where I had to draw up the strength of a father but also being the loving, nurturing, gentle mother as well.”
It inspired a scent that was neither masculine nor feminine. Father figure has a top note of fig, opening with a sweet lushness before drying down to sandalwood. Like many Phlur fragrances, it becomes musky rather than sharply green. Nurturing and grounding is a scent with both backbone and softness.
As we’re discussing the two very different fragrances that were born from her divorce, there’s a knock on the door. Chriselle’s fiancé enters, slightly sheepish. “I’m mid interview,” she says with a smile. He nods sheepishly and sits in the corner, listening in.
It’s a small moment, but it’s hard to miss the synchronicity. We’re recounting the collapse of a love story and the brand that rose from the ashes just as her next, deeply personal chapter, enters the room. It speaks to the way in which Lim has turned vulnerability into connection and, in doing so, built an empire.
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