Long before “clean beauty” and “green perfumery” became shelf-talkers at every fragrance counter. A family in North India was already doing the work those labels now try to describe. NASO, the artisanal perfumery built by Astha Suri, presents itself as India’s first green perfumery, and the claim rests less on marketing language than on a fragrance house close to 80 years old. Her great-grandfather, Sri Saligram Suri, began the family’s attar trade generations ago; her grandfather Rajneesh Suri, carried it forward; and her father Nischal Suri, has spent some 40 years in the craft by the family’s own account, perfecting the slow, deliberate art of attar-making long before anyone thought to call it sustainable. NASO, in other words, is a lineage story before it’s a founder story, and Astha happens to be its latest chapter.
Reviving A Craft Nobody Called Green Yet
Attar, the oil-based perfumery tradition built on distilling flowers, herbs, spices and woods directly into a base like sandalwood, has existed in India for centuries, largely as a wholesale, business-to-business trade rather than a consumer-facing luxury category.
That's the world Nischal Suri grew up inside, learning to read a blend the way a sommelier reads a wine, entirely by nose, entirely by decades of repetition. Astha grew up around that same trade without an assigned role in it, and when she returned to India in 2020, after studying architecture in the UK and fashion styling at Istituto Marangoni in Milan, she didn't look outward for a formula, she looked at what her own family had been sitting on the whole time. Her father, by her own account, wasn't immediately convinced; it took Astha two and a half years of sourcing vendors, refining packaging and running scent trials before NASO's blends were ready to prove him wrong.
The fragrances that resulted are built on pure attar-infused blends, using ingredients grown in-house at the family's own distilleries in North India, a supply chain that was never engineered for a sustainability pitch, simply inherited that way. No synthetics, rainwater harvesting, raw material composting, solar-powered production and a refill programme round out a practice that reads, on paper, like a checklist written for 2026, but was largely just how the family had always worked. What makes NASO distinct isn't the ingredients alone, it's the pairing of Nischal's decades of technical mastery with Astha's instinct for where a scent needs to go next: every blend built for uniformity and originality in the same breath, not a dupe of something already on the market, but something meant to smell like nothing else in the room.
The Spice Rack, Reimagined
Astha’s real intervention was conceptual: she looked at India’s oldest wellness system, Ayurveda, built on herbs and spices most Indian households already keep in the kitchen, and asked why none of it had made its way onto skin as fragrance rather than into food as flavour. "I noticed there being exhaustion, over-driving adults with very little peace of mind or happiness in their working life, resulting in quick burnout and toxic patterns," she has said of the brand's founding idea. "I wanted to take the help of our long forgotten herbs and spices, that we generally consume to eat, in the smell we wear. So we can breathe the healing auras all day long, while making them smell fabulous."
It's a repositioning that speaks directly to a younger, more burnt-out audience than traditional attar culture ever tried to reach: the same turmeric, saffron and oud that show up in a grandmother's kitchen cabinet, reframed as a quiet, wearable dose of calm for a generation raised on hustle culture. NASO's positioning statement calls it an anti-perfume perfume, gender-fluid by design and built around what the brand describes as a new normality, or normcore, sensibility, less about announcing a scent and more about simply feeling like yourself.
What’s In The Bottle, And The Box
The brand’s fragrance and home range spans pure attar-infused eau de parfums, concentrated oils, candles and incense, all built around the same in-house–grown ingredients, and its gifting line translates that into readymade sets. These include: a five-piece Scent Library of 10ml EDP’s at the accessible end, up through Casa Di Naso, a fuller sensorial set of dark-scent EDPs, candle, incense and surround scent, at the top.
NASO recently opened its first physical store, in Lucknow’s Hazratganj neighbourhood, marking the brand’s move from a purely digital and B2B presence into the retail for the first time.