Todorac

Half human and half horse, the faceless rider carries sabers and chains.

They come in late winter, the torso rising from the animal's back, the passing marked by hoofbeats and prints in the earth. Some regions bake hoof-shaped cookies as offerings, to protect households and livestock from their approach.

The Balkans are an adoptive community for Trung Vu rather than a birthplace, and this is the tribute. Pelinkovac, šljivovica and dunjevača. The beeswax candles of Orthodox churches. Inescapable cigarette smoke. Immortelle from Niš in southern Serbia gives the liquid its deep colour and that heavy, almost textural density.

A divisive one, and it rewards a taste for complicated sweetness.

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.