Levant Perfume was not built from a business plan. It was built from a feeling, the warmth, the spice, and the intoxicating air of a city that refused to leave Lisa Davis alone after she came home. This is the story of what she did about it.
A Feeling That Stayed
There is a particular quality to the air in Dubai. It arrives before anything else, before the gleaming lobby of the hotel, before the sensory rush of the souk, before the salt of the Gulf and the heat rising off the marble. It is warm, spiced, and alive in a way that is difficult to name and impossible to forget.
Lisa Davis first encountered that air seven years ago, and it has refused to leave her ever since.
“My love for perfume has been with me from a very young age,” she says. “My travels to the Middle East. Arriving in glitzy hotel lobbies or savouring the sights of awe-inspiring shopping malls ignited a passion in me. I set about emulating the heady aromas of sweet vanilla or sense-tingling spices.”
What began as a personal obsession became, over the course of seven years and multiple return visits to the UAE, the foundation of something much larger: Levant Perfume, a UK-made luxury fragrance brand built entirely on the memory of what a place smells like when it gets under your skin.
“I didn’t set out to build a perfume brand. I set out to hold onto a feeling. The warmth, the spice, and the intoxicating air of Dubai stayed with me long after I came home. Levant is my answer to that feeling. Every bottle is my way of capturing it and sharing it with you.”
~ Lisa Davis, Founder, Levant Perfume
The Pandemic, the Pivot, and the Purpose
The year was 2020. The world had closed. And for Lisa, then the owner of an interior design company in Stourbridge, the enforced stillness created something unexpected: space to think about what she actually wanted to build.
She had spent years noticing the way scent shaped spaces. Interior design had taught her that a room’s atmosphere was never purely visual. It was tactile, emotional, and yes, olfactory. She had watched hotel lobbies transform the moment you walked in, not because of the furniture but because of what was in the air. She had stood in the fragrance sections of Dubai’s extraordinary shopping malls and felt something happen to her nervous system.
The pandemic did not give her the idea. It gave her the time to take it seriously.
She began working with specialist perfumers in Dubai — making the trip multiple times a year as the world reopened — to develop a fragrance range that could carry the essence of that world back to the UK. Not a copy of it. Not a synthetic approximation. The real thing, built from premium oils blended in the Middle East and then hand-crafted in small batches in her home country.
How Levant fragrances are made
The oils are expertly blended in the Middle East, using ingredients sourced from the region. Oud, amber, rose, vanilla, and spice. They are then shipped to the UK, where every bottle is hand-poured with precision and care in small batches. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is outsourced to an automated line. The result is a fragrance that carries both worlds in a single spray.
What “Levant” Actually Means
The word itself is worth understanding. Levant comes from the French verb ‘lever’ — to rise — and historically referred to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, the place where the sun rises. For centuries it described the ancient crossroads of civilisation: the coasts of what is now Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Jordan, through which some of the most significant trade routes in human history passed.
Spices, resins, and rare botanical materials, the raw ingredients of perfumery, were among the most valuable goods carried along those routes. Oud wood from Southeast Asia. Rose absolute from the Levantine valleys. Frankincense from the Arabian peninsula. These were not luxury goods in the modern sense. They were currency. They were medicine. They were used in temples and royal courts across Egypt, Persia, and Greece.
When Lisa chose the name, she was not reaching for an aesthetic. She was reaching for a lineage – a 3,000-year-old tradition of taking what the East produces best and bringing it westward.
That, in essence, is what every Levant bottle does.
The Collection: Seven Fragrances, One World
The Levant collection spans seven Eau de Parfums — No.1 through No.7 — plus the limited Luna Stardust, each one a distinct emotional experience built around a different corner of the olfactory world Lisa fell in love with in Dubai.
The Levant Collection Shop all →
No.1 — the fragrance that began the collection is the most direct expression of what Lisa experienced in those Dubai lobbies: deep, sensual, and warm in a way that feels both Middle Eastern and unmistakably modern. Rose and pink pepper open it with confidence. Amber and cinnamon settle into its heart. Vanilla, patchouli, and agarwood close it slowly, almost reluctantly, into something that stays on the skin long after it should have faded.
Luna Stardust — the fragrance that has become perhaps the most talked-about in the range, it takes a different direction entirely. Cardamom, cinnamon, black pepper, and cumin open with the heat of an Arabian night market. Saffron and tobacco carry it through. Cedarwood, patchouli, and vanilla close it into something that customers describe, consistently, as addictive.
The home collection extends the same world into living spaces — slow-burning candles, reed diffusers that last up to three months, room sprays, and wax melts, all carrying Levant oils into every corner of a home.
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The Award That Said Something
In 2022, on one of her regular visits to Dubai to develop the next stage of the Levant collection, Lisa received an honour she had not anticipated.
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Khatoon Successful Women Award — Dubai, 2022
Lisa Davis was awarded the Khatoon Successful Woman title in Dubai – an award reserved for entrepreneurial women who demonstrate commitment and dedication to excellence. She is among a small number of UK founders to have received the recognition.
The Khatoon Successful Women award is not given to people who have simply launched something. It is given to people who have demonstrated, through their work, a genuine commitment to excellence and to the place they have been inspired by. For Lisa, a UK founder who had flown to Dubai multiple times every year to get her product right, it was a recognition that landed deeply.
“It has been quite a journey, and it is a dream come true,” she said at the time. “Not only to have seen my vision transformed into reality but to have been singled out for an award.”
The recognition in Dubai mattered in a particular way. It meant that the city which had inspired the whole project had, in some sense, given it its blessing.
Not Just a Perfume Brand
From the beginning, Lisa understood that scent was bigger than what you wear on your skin. Her background in interior design had shown her how profoundly a space is shaped by what is in the air. A hotel reception that smells extraordinary is not just pleasant — it is memorable, perhaps more memorable than the decor or the service.
Levant now works with premium hotels, spas, and beauty salons, supplying room diffusers, sprays, and candles that transform the first moment a guest crosses the threshold. The brand also offers a bespoke wedding service, personalised fragrance favours with names, dates, and messages printed on each bottle, creating a scented keepsake that long outlasts the flowers.
What Levant Is, at Its Core
There are many luxury perfume brands. Most of them are built around a creative director, a house, a heritage, or a price point. Levant is built around none of those things.
It is built around a question: what if you could bottle a feeling?
Not a concept of a feeling. Not a mood board approximation of warmth and spice. The actual, specific, irreplaceable feeling of stepping into a Dubai hotel lobby in the early morning and having the scented air change something in you before you have even checked in.
That is what Lisa Davis has spent five years and multiple transatlantic trips trying to put into a bottle. The reviews suggest she has come close.
“It smells like somewhere I’ve never been but feel I know,” wrote one customer. “That’s the only way I can describe it.”