Lili Bermuda · St. George’s
A place you
can find again.
A perfumer inherits decades of work. A bottle returns from a shipwreck. A familiar fragrance gets a new home. Lili Bermuda’s story is full of things worth carrying forward.
A perfume bottle can be a very small piece of luggage.
There is room in it for a place, a person, a particular time in your life. The label may carry one name while the person who owns it associates it with something entirely their own. That private meaning is part of what makes perfume interesting to me. The maker finishes a composition. The customer begins living with it.
Lili Bermuda gives that relationship an unusually rich setting. Its fragrances come from a perfumery with roots in 1928, a working home at Stewart Hall in St. George’s, and an owner whose creative life took shape after she moved to the island. There is even a fragrance whose story involves a bottle recovered from the seabed.
These are wonderful particulars. They also belong together. This is a company that keeps finding ways for something from another time to matter in the present.
Isabelle Ramsay-Brackstone
First, she had to learn
what she had inherited.
Isabelle Ramsay-Brackstone moved from Canada to Bermuda in 2003. The following year she became the perfumery’s owner and studied with David Bothello, whose experience in the craft extended over 45 years. Her company biography identifies Coral, introduced in 2006, as her first fragrance.
I like the interval between those dates. Becoming the owner and making the work are different accomplishments. A purchase can transfer a business in a day. The knowledge inside it has to travel through people.
Bothello belongs in that account. When a business changes hands, the new owner usually becomes the person the public learns to recognize. Naming the person who taught her makes the inheritance more visible. It gives the work a human connection across the change.
Isabelle’s creative background adds another place to the story: her father’s garden in Montreal. Her biography connects that early influence with Bermuda’s flowers, ocean air and landscape. She arrived with memories of her own. The island gave her new material to work with.
In an interview with Yachting, she described composition through a musical comparison: imagining the scent and then working to make it physically real. That is an appealing way to understand a perfumer’s job. A list of notes names some of the materials. The arrangement is where the author becomes apparent.
Ownership changes hands.
Knowledge passes between people.
Mary Celestia
Then the sea
returned a bottle.
The Mary Celestia sinks off Bermuda.
2013Recovered perfume travels to a laboratory for analysis.
The Mary Celestia was a Civil War blockade runner that sank off Bermuda in 1864. Its wreck eventually yielded bottles bearing the name of the London perfume house Piesse & Lubin. The discovery presented a remarkable question: what might have survived inside?
A 2014 account in Perfumer & Flavorist, coauthored by Ramsay-Brackstone, describes the investigation. Bermuda’s custodian of historic wrecks, Philippe Rouja, brought her into the project. In April 2013 she carried two recovered bottles, with government permission, to Drom Fragrances in New Jersey for examination.
The care involved is what holds my attention. An artifact can be fascinating while it is still a mystery. Opening it creates another responsibility: finding out what is there without letting the story you hope to tell outrun the evidence.
The work eventually led to Lili Bermuda’s Mary Celestia fragrance. The company’s current account describes the analysis and recreation; its fragrance notes include grapefruit, bergamot, orange flower and rosewood. The perfume sold today is a new composition recreated from the historical find, rather than liquid taken from the wreck.
That distinction makes the achievement more interesting. Someone had to interpret what survived and give it a form that could be experienced again. The old bottle supplied an extraordinary beginning. Living people supplied the expertise that carried it forward.
For a perfumery devoted to expressing Bermuda, this was an unusual encounter with the island. Its subject came from beneath the water, attached to a history much older than the company itself. A business can belong to a place deeply enough that the place occasionally gives it an assignment no one could have planned.
Stewart Hall · St. George’s
The address is part of the work.
Lili Bermuda’s home at Stewart Hall gives the company a physical center. Visitors can encounter a place where fragrances are made, learn something about the process and spend time with its history. The perfumery’s short introductory tour includes a look at the production area and history room.
A working place changes the way a finished object reads. Once you can imagine someone making it, the bottle contains more than its contents. It carries decisions, accumulated skill and the ordinary fact that somebody had to do the work.
That is particularly valuable in a category where language can become so elaborate that it floats away from the object. A room where things are made brings the description back to earth. Curiosity has somewhere concrete to go.
A familiar fragrance, a new presentation
The customer has
a history here, too.
In November 2025, Lili Bermuda announced a new presentation, including refillable 90ml Eau de Parfum bottles and shopping bags inspired by Stewart Hall. Its announcement also reassured customers about the continuity of their familiar fragrances.
That reassurance deserves a little attention. A company experiences a rebrand from the inside, through decisions about design, materials and the next stage of its life. A returning customer can experience it as a very simple question: is the thing I love still here?
There is affection inside that question. Someone has kept an earlier version of the business in their life. They may recognize a shape or a color before they remember the precise product name. Their connection began on a different date from the company’s current campaign.
I admire businesses that leave room for that difference. They can introduce new work while acknowledging the people who already care. Continuity becomes something the customer can understand, rather than something the business merely declares.
A refillable bottle adds an especially fitting detail. It is designed to stay. The first purchase anticipates a later return, and the object on the shelf has a place in both. For a perfumery with so much history in its materials, its people and its address, that is a pleasing way to imagine the future.
Something worth finding again.
The remarkable thing about Lili Bermuda is how many people have a part in what it preserves. An experienced perfumer teaches a new owner. Specialists investigate a recovered bottle. A maker interprets the island around her. Customers bring their own memories to a familiar fragrance.
Each contributes a different kind of knowledge. The company’s history becomes richer when those contributions remain visible.
That is why I find this perfumery worth writing about. Its past gives the present more to do. There are fragrances to create, familiar ones to keep recognizable, and a house where someone can arrive curious and leave with a new association of their own.
A place does not have to stay in the place where you found it.
Rob Urban
A few useful details
About Lili Bermuda.
Who is the perfumer behind Lili Bermuda?
Isabelle Ramsay-Brackstone has been Lili Bermuda’s owner and perfumer since 2004. She studied with David Bothello and introduced her first fragrance, Coral, in 2006.
What is the story behind Mary Celestia perfume?
It is a modern recreation informed by perfume recovered from the Mary Celestia, a ship that sank off Bermuda in 1864. The investigation involved historical bottles, laboratory analysis and the work of perfumers.
Where is the Bermuda Perfumery?
Lili Bermuda’s home is Stewart Hall at 5 Queen Street in the Town of St. George, Bermuda. Its official visitor pages provide current tour and workshop arrangements.
What changed in Lili Bermuda’s 2025 rebrand?
The company announced a move to refillable 90ml Eau de Parfum bottles and new presentation inspired by Stewart Hall. Its announcement also reassured customers about the continuity of their familiar fragrances.