Orange Cat Express

A daring olfactory riot: catmint and catnip collide with crackling citrus and sugar, delivering the frenetic energy of an orange cat in full sprint. Herbaceous, electric, and unapologetically chaotic.

Ginger root and catechu add a nostalgic, medicinal edge that recalls Asian vitality tonics—slightly bitter, a little rooty—set against geosmin and damp soil that make it feel like you’ve stepped outside into cool air after the rain.

As it settles, banana leaf bundles, tropical fruits, and warm cedarwood come forward, so the experience shifts from “neon drink and wet pavement” into a cozy, woody sweetness with fluffy musks that feel more like a warm cat piled into your lap on the ride home.

If you love citrus, energy-drink weirdness, petrichor, and playful woods, this is a fun pick for days when you want something bright, slightly bonkers, and still surprisingly wearable.

• 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.