Celadawn Darling

An ambrosial, luminous turn on the horchata amber.

The in-house horchata amber, luminous this time and approaching cloud nine, with toasted almonds and viscous honey around it. Angelic and magnetic.

Poached pears and iris flowers with sweet Mexican concha bread, the pan dulce, over a Tahitian vanilla bean. Brown sugar and pastel musks sit beneath it, warm. Latin America, Africa and the Mediterranean, with whimsical new twists.

Matteo Parfums is the work of Matthew J. Sánchez, a Southern California native, son of a Mexican-Sicilian father and a Ghanaian-American mother. Sánchez studied applied mathematics and chemistry at UCLA, then spent three and a half years in fragrance and chemistry research before founding the house in Los Angeles in 2017. Every release fuses cultures and concepts: a Korean wine with a Caribbean rum, Chinoiserie, a contemporary imagining of the Aztec, a horchata turned into an amber accord and made in-house.

The work is whimsical and imaginative, and the fragrances are hand bottled and formulated in California. The debut and its two flankers are formulated on the founder's own family heritage, with Latin, Mediterranean and African materials. The rest of the line reaches further, to Korea and the Caribbean, to China and Europe, to ancient Maya and Aztec, distant geographies with shared histories, each release its own fusion.