Nokken

It started outdoors, with wind and soil and the way they can rearrange a thought.

Trung Vu wanted something unvarnished, close to the ground, almost botanical. Seaweed does much of that work, bringing in salt, damp earth and a hint of sulfur, because reality requires imperfection. Fir, hemlock and cypriol run alongside it, oakmoss and Choya Nakh underneath.

It takes its name from a shapeshifting spirit of lakes, rivers and ponds. That spirit lures the unwary with the sound of a violin carried over the water, or appears at the shoreline as a pale horse, and its true form is described as moss-covered, with yellow eyes and sharp teeth. Even in the calm there is a noise running through it, a faint distortion.

For someone who finds most green things too tidy.

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.