Hotteok

Cinnamon leaves and a roasted nut accord sit on top of warm brown sugar, so it immediately feels like a freshly pressed Hotteok held between your hands on a cold night.

As it settles, sweet rice flour and black locust blossom add a doughy, softly floral coziness, while sesame, woods, and musk create a nutty, toasty base that feels like syrup-soaked crumbs, paper bags, and shared pockets of warmth.

It reads as an intimate, cozy gourmand you’ll reach for when you crave something that smells like real dessert—molasses, starch, subtle spice—without turning into a loud, frosting-heavy sugar bomb.

KST Scent began with Kael Jeong and a conviction that the smallest moments carry the most weight. Growing up in Korea, Jeong learned that a shared laugh or a quiet night of inspiration can hold an entire life inside it, and built a fragrance house to translate those moments into scent. The brand lives inside LV1 Studio, the independent perfumery project Jeong runs alongside perfumer James Nguyen.

Half the lineup reaches backward, into Korean childhood: street-food sweetness, late-night drinking, the smell of a neighborhood in winter. The other half reaches for something louder, the thrill of being seen exactly as you are. Jeong lets the two run together instead of choosing, which is the point. The scents are composed by hand, sometimes tender and sometimes deliberately brash, and each one is tied to a moment that actually happened.