Starlight Sesame

Mid-January in Maharashtra, the sun climbs higher and the cold air fills with woodsmoke and song. 

This is the festival of Sankrant, when longer days are welcomed with bonfires, kites stitched across the sky, and sweets pressed from sesame and raw jaggery, shared hand to hand among neighbors. The first breath is bright and green, bergamot lifted by cool narcissus petals, before warm toasted sesame settles onto a soft pillow of tonka. Then comes the slow gold of jaggery, honey, and labdanum, round and glowing, like sitting close to a fire while frost still edges the morning. Nutty and sweet without ever turning heavy, it carries the kind of warmth that feels like an arm around the shoulder, a small celebration of abundance held through the coldest stretch of the year.

Scent Trunk commissions its fragrances one at a time from independent noses working across the world, and prints their names on the page beside the work. It looks for cultural heterogeneity and industry experience, and works with the self-taught as readily as the academically trained, the bootstrapping entrepreneur as readily as the corporate nose. Each year it also picks unconventional noses, chefs or writers or musicians with an exceptional creative streak.

Most releases name one material as their focus and one place as their provenance, and each carries a signed passage in which the person who made it says what they were after. Winternights is hay cured on Swedish poles. Tears and Smiles is pineapple cake and oolong in Taiwan. Stroopwafel is a canal house in Amsterdam with tulips on the table. The material and the place come first, and the writing follows them.