RE:M

You move through this one in chapters, almost like waking, drifting, and waking again.

First comes that “white room” moment: mint, yuzu, and sake feel sharp, clean, and a little bitter-green, like brushed teeth, cool air, and a mind that won’t stop replaying easier days.

Then you’re at the bar before opening, wrapped in jasmine tea and shochu with a calm, quiet buzz; the space smells like wiped-down counters, hinoki wood, and this oddly compelling metallic carrot nuance that keeps things from feeling too polished or pretty.

Tobacco threads through the background, anchoring the story in something slightly smoky and human, before everything softens into a heavy dose of fluffy, white laundry musk—like sliding back into a clean bed and realizing it was all a dream, but you still feel it.

If you like ideas that sit between comfort and distance, clean and boozy, memory and fantasy, this feels like a quiet staple you reach for when you want your day to feel a little more cinematic.

• 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.