Midnight Lychee

A litchi tree in an uncle's backyard, climbed and remembered.

Bark and leaves mixed with the honeyed sweetness of overripe fruit crushed underfoot. The bright fruit is here, and so is the darker, candied side of litchi once it ferments.

Taiwanese cypress, cedar moss and cashmeran run dark and velvety, and tinctures of dried litchi skin, white tea and red reishi mushroom set earth beneath the sweetness to keep the fruit level. Bulgarian rose and warm spices add body, and real litchi tincture goes into the bottle.

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.