DURIAN

The most divisive fruit in the world smells, up close, like a secret worth keeping.

Creamy and tropical, with a richness that reads almost like custard, this is durian reframed — not tamed, but understood. It begins bright and citrusy, lifted by the sharp green bite of makrut lime and the clean, slightly smoky coolness of tea leaves. Then comes the fruit itself: a real tincture, dense and alive, wrapped around the buttery softness of avocado. The two settle into each other like the ingredients of a well-loved smoothie — something familiar and a little indulgent. As it warms, a sweet condensed milk accord rises underneath, soft and comforting, grounded by amber.

The result is tropical and gourmand at once, unapologetically itself. Spiky on paper, deeply wearable in practice.

• 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.