Les Cahiers Secrets

Experience a timeless, powdery fragrance reminiscent of a grandmother's scent, embellished with warm, flushed-skin spices.

Exude the essence of an avant-garde literary circle's only female member. Inspired by Anaïs Nin's diaries, with passages collected and carefully crafted, this scent captures the sensual and subversive power of women's language.

This fragrance pays homage to Nin's life as a writer and private individual in 1930s Paris, where she financially and creatively supported a community of other authors. Her groundbreaking work as a female erotica writer in the 1940s went unnoticed until the second-wave feminist movement, when her diaries were finally published and her literary star began to rise. Despite later controversy surrounding her personal life, Nin's lyrical expression of femininity continues to be embraced in the digital age.

“I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from a man's and for which man's language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored.”
- ANAIS NIN Delta of Venus (1977)

Warm, nostalgic, sensual.
A well-travelled writer's den.

Jouissance Parfums is a London fragrance house founded by Cherry Cheng, whose academic formation spans Sotheby's Institute of Art and Goldsmiths, University of London. The brand was born from the books that get read beneath the sheets — transgressive works of female authorship that still unsettle and captivate. Its name comes from a concept explored by French feminist writer Hélène Cixous: a sensual, mystical abundance understood as the source of female creative power, linked to women's capacity for pleasure that transgresses the limits set for it.

Jouissance fragrances are made to provoke. Trained in classical traditions but driven to disrupt, each composition moves between the shocking and the sublime — animalic undertones, aldehyde accents, accords that surface buried memory. Beyond the bottle, the brand cultivates a living cultural community: sourcing out-of-print books, hosting salons, banquets, and film screenings, and supporting the next generation of female creatives through commissions and collaborations. Écriture féminine — the specificity of women's language and expression — is the animating principle behind everything Jouissance makes.