CÀ PHÊ by NIGHT

Vietnamese coffee after dark - deep, bitter brew softened just enough to feel smooth but not sugary.

The opening pairs dark Vietnamese coffee with carrot and tomato leaf, so you notice roasted richness, nutty root, and a surprisingly green edge that recalls grocery aisles and potted plants as much as a café table.

As it moves, jasmine, hay absolute, and oakmoss slide in, giving the coffee a soft floral glaze and a dry, grassy shadow that make it feel more like a late-night variety-show set than a dessert bar—quiet, a little smoky, and slightly melancholy.

In the base, sandalwood, civet, and ambergris wrap everything in a milky-woody texture with a gentle animalic purr, turning the whole experience into something intimate and moody rather than bright or sugared. 

If you love coffee but prefer it more bitter, green, and atmospheric than caramel-heavy, this is an easy pick for evenings in, slow dates, and any time you want to smell like a quiet show is playing somewhere in the background.

• James Nguyen

d.grayi is the work of James Nguyen, known also as Miju, a perfumer who came to scent as an adversary rather than a calling. A career spent around hair color and its chemicals left James allergic. Fragrance meant headaches and a throat swelling shut, and anything scented was avoided outright. Cosmetic chemistry, taken up as a hobby, brought the first turn: cosmetic raw materials that smelled unpleasant, and natural ingredients found to soften them.

Then came a dream, in which someone deeply important who had passed away returned and described a fragrance. It was not a scent so much as a complete story, vivid and pictured, and James woke and wrote down every detail. The quest to recreate it became the studio. Isolated aroma molecules, tried later, provoked nothing; the allergy had been to composition, not to any one material. James now builds olfactive stories unrestricted.