Simmer Dim

The sun barely dips below the horizon.

Gorse leads, prickly and lactonic, a milky brightness lifting off the cliffside flowers. Neroli and hedione carry that outward. Then the cool evening air comes in off the water, ozonic and thin. The day it is lifting was spent among the glittering rock pools and sandy shores of the Scottish coast at Largs. Childhood surfaces with it, in warm brick under bare feet, melted ice cream, and buttercups and daisies picked while waiting for a friend. Beeswax absolute is the sticky part of that. Ambergris and dry woods hold the sunset end of it, pink into orange with no seam.

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.