Brooke Lean

Brooke Lean is the founder of The Virtue, an independent perfume brand built around scent as ritual, memory, and modern luxury. Her work explores fragrance as something personal and intentional, created with care rather than speed or spectacle.

Some people see the world. Others smell it. Brooke Lean does both — simultaneously.

Step inside The Virtue's flagship store in New Plymouth, New Zealand, and you're instantly transported to another realm. Everything from the tone of the lighting and the colour of the walls to the textures of the furniture and the almost inaudible music playing in the background has been specifically chosen to help you forget the outside world. You'll notice all this, but mostly, you'll notice the scent.

Brooke Lean began her professional life as a photographer — a wedding photographer, specifically — spending over a decade capturing moments that move people. Based at the foot of Mount Taranaki, surrounded by the wild black sand beaches of New Zealand's North Island West Coast, her work was always more than composition and light.

What sets Brooke apart is her sensory superpower: a heightened perception that means she experiences sights as smells. Her images always had scent associated with them, whether she noticed it consciously or not. When she experienced a scene, those smells were always intricately attached.

The transformation from photographer to perfumer wasn't a pivot — it was an evolution. A natural progression to make fragrances that were inextricably connected to her art.

In 2016, Brooke travelled to Cuba following a wedding shoot in Los Angeles. The trip changed everything. Five days of immersion in Havana's texture — the dry tobacco leaves, the warm nights, the rum-soaked air, the vintage cars, the crumbling grandeur.

She returned with photographs and something more: the foundation for what would become The Virtue's signature collection. Fragrances like Castro — an intoxicating blend of Cuban tobacco, smoked wood, violet, cedar, dark rum, and Peruvian balsam. Or Cienfuegos and La Habana, each capturing different facets of that whirlwind trip.

In 2017, Brooke and creative partner Gina Fabish opened The Virtue on Devon Street West in New Plymouth. More than a store, it was a statement: a creative hub built on women empowerment.

The space occupies a heritage building from circa 1863 — a former law office whose old safe, once used for important legal documents, now houses raw ingredients. Bergamot. Cedarwood. Frankincense. The building's history adds weight to fragrances designed to transport you through time.

What distinguishes The Virtue from conventional perfume houses is the creative process. Brooke works in collaboration with perfumers in Grasse, France — the world capital of perfumery — but the direction flows from New Zealand. She builds moodboards on her office wall: photographic imagery dabbed with scent, scrawled writing, collected objects that help bring each story to life.

The collaboration has now spanned over six years, producing a range of fine fragrances, room sprays, candles, and hand-rolled charcoal incense — all designed in New Plymouth and made in New Zealand.

Her fragrance 1987 captures the scent of Brooke's first school teacher — a woman whose name she can't recall, but whose smell is indelibly marked on her memory. Silver bangles stacked on her wrist. A powerful white floral that elbows its way into a room.

Back Beach captures the Taranaki coastline itself. Bold and complex, like the place. Beautiful but hard to trust. Sea salt and bergamot colliding with smoky birch tar and rose.

Photography career spanning 10+ years, specialising in weddings and editorial

Featured: NZ Herald Viva, Fashion Quarterly, Ensemble Magazine, Together Journal

Product range: Fine fragrances, room sprays, candles, hand-rolled incense

Stockists: WORLD, Endemic World, and independent retailers across New Zealand

Location: Heritage 1863 building, Devon Street West, New Plymouth

The conventional path for a New Zealand creative might lead to Auckland or Sydney. Brooke Lean stayed in New Plymouth — at the foot of a mountain, beside wild black sand beaches — and built something that reaches Grasse.

Her fragrances aren't smelling pleasant. They're aromachology: the science of how scent affects emotion. Each creation is designed to trigger memories, alter moods, transport wearers to moments that have deeply imprinted upon them.

In a world of mass-market fragrance, The Virtue offers something rare: scent as art, as therapy, as time travel. And at the centre of it all is a photographer who learned to capture souls in a different medium.