PHO-GERE

Verdant basil, piercing mint, and earthy sprout notes rising through steam. Bold, herbaceous, unapologetically alive.

Up top, it feels spicy-green and a little citrusy, like you’ve squeezed lime over a pile of herbs while pho spices simmer a table or two away, so you get warmth and comfort without smelling like you’ve spilled soup on yourself. As it settles, Saigon cinnamon, star anise, and other kitchen spices hum in the background while Vietnamese oud, galangal, and a soft civet accord add a subtle animalic depth that keeps everything from reading purely “fresh.”

The galangal reins in the funk and turns that animalic edge into something cozy and wearable, making this feel like a playful, green fougère that nods to French tradition while clearly rooted in Vietnamese-American food culture. If you like basil-heavy profiles, kitchen herbs, and a bit of weirdness that still feels thoughtfully put together, this fits both casual days and nights when you want something people will ask about.

• 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.