Alien Fruit

Asked where they are from, the children point at the sky.

An electric rainbow of bikinis and sarongs, at a resort too posh to be real. Francesca is poolside, with Italian and Mandarin and French and Spanish drifting past between the cabanas. Musk and white amber lift off warm skin. Guava comes off the trays, tropical and a little overripe.

Then the cold things: yuzu sorbet, pomegranate seeds crunched out of a drink, redcurrant sharp behind them, a wedge of watermelon so heavy with juice it runs down to the wrist. Cyclamen cuts under the sugar. Two children appear eating something lime yellow, almost neon. Grazie, xièxie, merci, gracias: not one of the thank-yous lands, and they whisper to each other in a language never heard before. They point up, the sky turns from blue to pink, and they are gone. Held to the light, what they leave behind turns everything neon.

NEYDO works from a single source: the olfactory dream. Smell during sleep is rare, and when it happens it arrives at an intensity waking life does not reach. The house collects accounts of it from anyone who will send one, keeps them in a living archive, and passes some of them to a working nose to be translated into something that can be worn on skin.

The credit on every release is the first name of the person whose dream it was. Bertrand Duchaufour, Julia Rodríguez, Maud Chabanis, Soizic Beaucourt, Lucas Sieuzac and Joëlle Lerioux Patris have all taken one across, and the fragrances are made in France. Nothing in the line is styled after a trend. The archive stays open, dreams keep arriving, and a few of them become the next ones.