When New York City-based perfumer Renee Junewicz found herself in Coronado, she was inspired by the scents and smells of the island. So much, in fact, that she created and bottled her own fragrance, calling it Sincerely, Coronado.
It all started in 2018 around Mother’s Day. Junewicz was staying on the island while her son trained with the U.S. Navy. She said it was a stressful time in her life as a mother, so she tried to focus her attention elsewhere.
“I remember walking through Coronado and noticing the gardenias and jasmine growing along the residential streets, the green freshness, the ocean air and how extraordinarily beautiful everything seemed,” she said. “In the middle of all that worry, I found myself focusing on those things.”
She says she was struck by the combination of lush flowers, green hedges and fresh coastal air.
“Gardenia and jasmine seemed to grow almost casually around the island, yet their fragrance would stop you in your tracks,” she said.
She noted a “fascinating” olfactory contrast.
“There is the coolness and slight salinity of the ocean air, but also the warmth and fullness of the flowers,” she said. “It can smell fresh, green, marine and intensely floral all at once.”
Junewicz continued to visit the island and spent December of 2020 at the Coronado Shores. When she returned to New York, she wanted to preserve something beautiful from her visits to the island.
In 2025, she released the award-winning fragrance, Sincerely, Coronado.
The fragrance is described as a “love letter to a place by the Pacific.” It’s celebrated for its notes of gardenia and jasmine hedges, cool green freshness and a suggestion of ocean air.
“The fragrance grew from Coronado, California…quiet streets, white houses warmed by sunlight, and flowers blooming close to the sea,” according to the perfumer’s website.
Sincerely, Coronado went on to receive six distinctions in the 2025 Top Artisan Fragrance Awards, including recognition for Aroma, Scent Artistry, Ingredient Combinations and Top Artisan Perfume.
“I want people to feel transported — to experience the beauty, serenity and slightly dreamlike quality of Coronado, even if they have never been there,” said Junewicz.
The fragrance is available for purchase on the Scent & Story NYC website.
How it all began
Before she knew anything about making perfume, Junewicz understood that fragrance could hold a memory.
“My fascination with perfume began when I was very young,” she said.
Her father was a career Navy carrier pilot and would return from deployments around the world with beautiful perfumes for her mother.
“To me, those bottles seemed to contain places I had never been and worlds I knew nothing about,” said Junewicz.
She said she got her first perfume-making kit in the third grade and she proceeded to make the “most terrible fragrances imaginable.”
But the childhood fascination with perfume never left her, and she moved on to study the art and technical craft of perfumery, including training at the Grasse Institute of Perfumery in France.
Ultimately, Junewicz opened up Scent & Story NYC, a fragrance house built around memories, people and places.
A sense of place and story
Junewicz said that most of her fragrances often begin with a real memory or place.
“I write the story first and then try to translate what I remember into scent,” she said. “For me, place is inseparable from memory. We often remember the people we loved through the places where we knew them, and scent can bring the whole experience back with astonishing immediacy.”
She said that Sincerely, Coronado captures the island as she experienced it, but it also holds the family memories that became attached to that place.
“The fragrance came from an emotional period in my life as a mother,” said Junewicz. “Although Coronado was extraordinarily beautiful, my feelings at the time included love, pride, worry, and uncertainty. I think fragrance can hold several emotions simultaneously.”
It also holds the memory of flowers.
“One of the things I love about Coronado is that extraordinary flowers appear in the most personal and unexpected places,” she said.
One day, while walking to church, she came upon a beautiful little garden filled with roses. She describes it as an intimate, lovingly-tended space, almost magical in its perfection.
While the floral composition in Sincerely, Coronado is not intended to reproduce one particular garden, it’s the unique interpretation of the flowers, greenery, and atmosphere that lingered with her.
“A place is never merely a location,” she said. “It becomes a container for people, emotions and moments we want to preserve. Fragrance gives me a way to revisit those places — and, for a little while, to be with those people again.”
Bottling Coronado
When it comes to crafting a perfume like Sincerely, Coronado, it’s all about capturing the special scents of the island.
“The green effect comes from a ‘petitgrain accord’ that evokes the leaves, stems and hedges surrounding Coronado’s flowers,” said Junewicz.
For the marine aspect, Junewicz used “seaweed absolute” as part of a larger custom-blended fragrance mixture. It’s designed to suggest cool, salt-tinged Pacific air. The deeper notes come from oakmoss and a warm amber, which give the fragrance depth and anchor the airy florals.
“Seaweed absolute may sound unusual in a perfume, but it is used with great restraint,” she said. “It does not make the fragrance smell literally like seaweed. Instead, it contributes a subtle, natural and mineral quality beneath the flowers.”
She said she wanted the perfume to capture this contrast, rather than smell like a conventional tropical or beach fragrance.
Challenges and rewards
Junewicz says the most rewarding moment in creating a fragrance is when someone smells one of her perfumes and feels something, especially when it awakens a memory of their own.
“They may not have lived my particular story, but the fragrance connects them to a person, place or moment from their own life,” she said.
The biggest challenge is translating an emotional memory into scent while still creating a balanced, beautiful and wearable perfume, she said.
“Memory does not arrive neatly divided into top, middle, and base notes,” said Junewicz. “A perfumer has to determine which materials will convey not only how a place smelled, but also how it felt.”
Celebrating a scent
While Junewicz also works as a trained artist, she says fragrance gives her an entirely new kind of freedom.
“Fragrance can reach a much larger audience,” she said.
But scent is intensely personal. She says that one person may not respond to a fragrance, while ten others may fall in love with it.
“Intellectually, I understand that, but creating anything still requires vulnerability,” she said. “You put something deeply personal into the world without knowing whether other people will recognize what you were trying to express.”
She says she worked on Sincerely, Coronado for over a year.
“I’m really putting myself out there when I offer it to the outside world,” she said. “That’s why the awards for the fragrance are so meaningful to me.”
She said that the awards reassured her that the beauty and emotion she believed were present in the fragrance could be experienced by people outside her own memories.
“They made me feel that what I had created was not only personally true, but that it could communicate that truth to others,” she said.
Junewicz hopes the people of Coronado will enjoy Sincerely, Coronado as she does.
“I hope people in Coronado will recognize something authentic in it, while also finding room within the fragrance for their own memories of the island,” she said.
