Ceremonial Rice

A Vietnamese wedding day lingers here — lotus and tea leaves gathered around the glow of burning agarwood.

Crafted to honor a friend's marriage, it unfolds like a tea ceremony before the family altar. Cool lotus and steamed jasmine rice drift in translucent layers, earthy and nutty, softened by delicate sweetness. Rice wine, betel, and sticky rice gather close, along with Bánh Xu Xê, the tapioca and mung bean cake shared between husband and wife. Tuberose and orchid rise like blooms set out for the celebration, while Vietnamese oud and warm woods deepen into candlelit heat. Silken musk smooths the spiced bitterness of betel into something tender.

Like the royal blues, reds, and elemental stripes of the Nhật Bình dress that inspired it, the story moves between water-clear calm and radiant warmth — comforting, glowing, and auspicious, a keepsake of one luminous day.

• 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.