Moon Jasmine

Under a Patagonian full moon, snow-capped peaks ring a lake that holds the silver light. 

Along its edge, wild Chilean jasmine opens star-shaped flowers that seem to glow in the dark. This bloom is pure invention — the real flower has never been captured — so it lives here as memory: heady, creamy, sweet. Ripe chirimoya and maracuyá tumble in first, juicy and playful, like fruit gathered at the water's edge. As the night deepens, the alpine world rises through it — smoky incense, warm sandalwood, a trace of black tea and vanilla curling like breath in cold air. Soft musk settles over everything, the feeling of standing still beneath a sky too wide to name. A dream of fruit, flower, and frost at once, held together by light off the water.

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.