Penanggal

A summer night, thick with humidity.

The Penanggal takes her name from the Malay tanggal — to detach, to come loose. By day she looks like any other woman. After dark, her head separates from her body and flies alone, entrails trailing beneath her, hunting through the night air.

Yellow Floral, White Floral, Chypre, Tropical, Citrus, Fruity.

The perfumer built the scent around a specific atmosphere: heat, sweetness sitting heavy in the air, insects humming, everything a little overripe. Jean Patou's Joy was the reference point for the jasmine, reworked through a Southeast Asian lens — the humidity, the weight, the way scent carries differently there. It's an atmosphere the perfumer can't fully explain, but calls comforting, like home.

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.