Celadawn

West Africa meets Latin America meets the Mediterranean.

Horchata, turned into an amber accord and made in-house, sits at the centre, paired with a Sicilian blood orange, the arancia rossa. Sultry and suave, the two of them.

Built on Sánchez's own multiethnic heritage, with Latin, Mediterranean and African woods, herbs, spices, fruit and flora in one fusion. Saffron out of Spain, cinnamon from Vietnam and Indian black peppercorn run warm. Virginia cedar and a Mexican vanilla sit under all of it, with a beige musk. Confident, regal and comforting, it draws attention.

Matteo Parfums is the work of Matthew J. Sánchez, a Southern California native, son of a Mexican-Sicilian father and a Ghanaian-American mother. Sánchez studied applied mathematics and chemistry at UCLA, then spent three and a half years in fragrance and chemistry research before founding the house in Los Angeles in 2017. Every release fuses cultures and concepts: a Korean wine with a Caribbean rum, Chinoiserie, a contemporary imagining of the Aztec, a horchata turned into an amber accord and made in-house.

The work is whimsical and imaginative, and the fragrances are hand bottled and formulated in California. The debut and its two flankers are formulated on the founder's own family heritage, with Latin, Mediterranean and African materials. The rest of the line reaches further, to Korea and the Caribbean, to China and Europe, to ancient Maya and Aztec, distant geographies with shared histories, each release its own fusion.