Alter Oud

The family altar was always lit when someone walked through the door — smoke, offering, and the smell of jasmine rice already in the air.

Smoke rises slowly from a bowl of jasmine rice. Tropical fruit, left as an offering, releases its sweetness into the warm air. The room smells of incense burned down to ash, of spices carried across generations, of something ancient and close. This is the world of the Vietnamese bàn thờ — the home altar — translated into an artisan woody, spiced creation built around real Vietnamese agarwood: a material sacred, rare, and increasingly out of reach for the very communities it belongs to. Dark fruit and saffron arrive first, bright against a smoky undercurrent. Then jasmine rice and incense pull the mood inward, grounding everything in warmth and ritual.

Notes: Mangosteen, Saffron, Dark Fruits, Incense, Jasmine Rice, Vietnamese Spices, Vietnamese Oud, Turmeric, Amber

d.grayi is an artisan fragrance house from the United States, created by perfumer James “Miju” Nguyen and offered through LV1 Studio.

Drawing on Vietnamese and Korean roots, the brand crafts narrative-driven perfumes that blend traditional materials—like jasmine rice, pandan, pho spices, and Vietnamese oud—with contemporary perfume techniques to form vivid “olfactive stories.”

Nguyen’s journey into perfumery began after a vivid dream of a complex, never-before-smelled scent, which he set out to recreate, shaping a collection that now spans dozens of experimental fragrances.