Hmong Bobtail Dog

Green tea climbs through cool mountain air, threading past makrut lime and rough highland herbs gathered across the borderlands of northern Vietnam and Laos.

Grasshoppers stir in fields where lemongrass and mugwort grow, familiar to anyone who has cooked in these hills. Hemp and indigo carry the memory of hand-dyed cloth, woven by artisans whose work has traveled for generations. Underneath, Lao oud and dark wood settle in, steady and animalic, like a companion who never strays far.

Those who grew up wandering these markets say it calls back the smell of their clothes at the end of a long day — herbs, smoke, and fabric that cling long after the walk home.

• 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.