Byredo at Sephora: a tester on a chain, not a boutique
From September 3, Gypsy Water sits in 24 US Sephora stores. Still niche, or not anymore — vote.
On September 3, Byredo goes on the shelf in 24 Sephora stores across the US and on the chain's site. This isn't a betrayal, it's a plan: Puig, the Spanish group that owns the brand, already sells Rabanne and Carolina Herrera through Sephora, and founder Ben Gorham walked out back in June 2025. In Canada, Byredo has been in Sephora since November. Now, the two camps.
For: a tester in your hand beats a boutique two cities away
Until now, smelling Gypsy Water — juniper and lemon that settles into sandalwood within an hour — meant a trip to the boutique or a blind buy off a decant site. Sephora gives you testers, returns and a shelf in every big mall, and nobody at the counter is sizing up your sneakers. "Niche" only ever meant "sold in very few places"; the word does nothing to the smell. You want Byredo — go smell it.
Niche isn't a smell. It's the number of doors it stands behind.
The other camp points at the chain: at Sephora the testers are tethered to the stand and the bottles sit behind glass, and Glossy quotes a perfume historian saying there's no luxury left in that. Anyone chasing rarity has already moved on — Marc-Antoine Barrois, whose Ganymede comes from perfumer Quentin Bisch, lands this week in exactly one Australian department store and refuses to scale. Niche didn't die, it moved. If Byredo was your "not everyone has this" — go find the next one.