ABOUT THE STUDIO
Our Story
Tanaïs is a New York City based author and perfumer. Their book In Sensorium: Notes For My People, won the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. This genre-defying book offers a necessary, alternative feminist perspective of South Asian history, colonization, caste and nation-state formation, through the fascinating lens of scent history and sensuality.
They are the author of the critically-acclaimed novel Bright Lines, Finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and The Brooklyn Public Library Prize.
Their forthcoming feminist futurist novel, Stellar Smoke will be published by Dutton Books in 2026.
Photo credit: Hassan Sayed
Adorn Your Body, our ethos, is a call for us to feel at home in our body, own our innate beauty, as we are, with beauty and fragrance as a way interconnected histories is central to their artistic practice. Adornment is a sensuous act of resistance. Liberation is the ultimate goal.
Our inspirations are rooted in Tanaïs's home, the wild beauty of New York City, their motherland Bangladesh, and their spiritual home: India, Hawaii, Bali, Mexico, Morocco, the Mojave Desert. Places where the ancient and future become one.
As a novelist and essayist, Tanaïs constantly draws upon literature, dance, film, music, nature, the cosmos and the Divine when creating a perfume, always drawing upon syncretic South Asian olfactory and spiritual traditions that have existed for eons.
Each and every order sustains us, and our livelihoods as two femme artists, Tanaïs and Beauty & Studio Director, Talysha Moneé.
MEET OUR BEAUTY & STUDIO DIRECTOR
Raised in San Antonio, TX, Talysha Moneé moved to NYC in 2010 and graduated from Makeup Designery Soho, starting their first film in the summer of 2011.
Talysha has worked on over fifty independent films since then, showcasing a range of skills in beauty and SFX makeup. Inspired by punk aesthetics, taxidermy, and going into nature to find the beginnings of makeup, like pigments, berries, dirts and clays. Their beauty practice honors the delicate interplay between human anatomy, sensuality, and cycles of life and death.