Wu Gang

An osmanthus tree on the moon, and the question of how it smells after being struck down.

Everything centres on a single material taken through all of its facets, the tea, the apricot, the tobacco, the leather, the animalic edge. It follows the trajectory of the story, moving from bright and resonant into a sharp decline that becomes suffocating, mineralic and dry.

This is the first release since the debut collection, built from one of the earliest formulas Trung Vu ever finished, made for family and friends and revisited to mark how far the work has come. A mortal man sought immortality and angered the heavens through impatience. The punishment was the moon, and a tree to cut down that heals each time it is struck.

For someone who already knows osmanthus and wants to see it taken somewhere else.

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.