La Candelaria

Shelter from a downpour, in an old café with carved wooden walls.

La Candelaria was born in the rain, in Bogotá's historic centre. Alejandro Acosta took shelter and began writing, imagining a work that could hold the spirit of Colombia, the family's country. The guava tree in Acosta's grandmother's courtyard is the centre of the work: in the rainy season the ripe fruit fell, intensely fruity, slightly musky, with the fermented sweetness only a perfectly ripe guava has.

Mango, lime and white flowers make it luminous and vibrant. Café con leche and palo santo bring the warmth of Bogotá's historic cafés, and so do cinnamon and Virginia cedar. Ginkgo adds a refined green edge that balances the tropical fruit's richness and extends the freshness. Bright yet comforting, tropical yet elegant, it turns a deeply personal memory into a landscape that feels familiar. A scarlet macaw, a symbol of Colombia's biodiversity, hand-painted, crowns the bottle, so no two are alike.

Malasombra began as a personal artistic project following the death of Alejandro Acosta's father, a perfumer at IFF. Acosta grew up in Benicarló, a small Mediterranean town home to one of IFF's largest fragrance-ingredient facilities, where perfume was inseparable from the landscape and daily life. Revisiting that heritage became the starting point for an investigation into scent as an artistic medium.

Each Malasombra work combines fragrance, handcrafted sculpture, and narrative into a single object. These are not luxury products: they explore scent as a vehicle for memory, symbolism, and cultural history, asking for a slower, more intimate encounter than image-based culture allows. Merging traditional craftsmanship, contemporary art, and perfumery, Malasombra proposes fragrance as an autonomous artistic language, carrying ideas, emotion, and cultural narrative with the same depth as painting or sculpture.