Catoblepas

This one struggled to fall into place, so Trung Vu leaned into that instead.

The others in the first collection are built on clear classical structures. Here the idea was to take away the visual cues and the placebo of suggestion, letting the mind wander without anything obvious to hold onto. It is meant to be offbeat, peculiar and hard to read. Spices and resins common to Aethiopia do the building, and a heavy dose of myrrh gives it a metallic, almost bloodlike edge cutting through the heaviness.

In ancient accounts the beast it takes its name from is described as heavy-headed, able only to face the ground. Its danger lies not in pursuit but in the fatal meeting of its eyes.

The hardest one to put into words, so start with the sample.

Grimoire Parfums is the work of one person. Trung Vu spent a decade in luxury retail and cosmetics, trained as a dancer before that and worked as a makeup artist, and the craft itself is self-taught. Every formula is created and compounded by hand in a Melbourne studio. The label artwork, the cap specification and the outer packaging are designed in-house, with components produced to exact specification.

The name comes from Old French for a book of magic or spells, and the house is built on narrative, folklore and gothic themes. The first collection ran to five volumes, each drawn from a different region's dark storytelling, and a sixth has since followed. The reference point is the golden era, from the 1920s through the late nineties, when work carried a distinct point of view and moved independently of trend.