Chai Ching

There is ink in this one, and a cold room to write in.

White peppermint, lime leaf and camphor flower get into the sinuses first. Then something unlikely — banana, creamy and out of place, softening the menthol from underneath.

The lavender is real lavender, herbal and slightly bitter, and salvia miltiorrhiza brings a dry root edge in with it. Chrysanthemum and pear blossom stay papery. Himalayan red pine and white pine resin give it a spine. The ink outlasts the flowers.

Damfool writes before he blends. Each release starts as a person — a place, an era, a life with something unresolved in it — and the formula follows the character rather than the other way round. Lord of Tree is drawn from an Ah Cheng novel. Most of the rest are his own.

Nothing in the line shares a signature, and none of them is the lead. The recurring figures are altar keepers, aunties, and people coming home after too long away, closer to the characters met at the edge of a world than to anyone at its centre. The seasons make it literal: Cantonese memory in the first, Fujian in the second, a Macau port town in the third, three generations of one timber family in the fourth.

Behind all of it is one Macanese perfumer at one bench in Chengdu. He builds his own components and tinctures instead of buying them ready-made, and works with materials that are hard to get or specific to one place — aged nutmeg paste from a Penang spice factory running for over a century, Tibetan yak extract that took a year to render.