Aethi Opum

Rain has just passed when you wear Aethi Opum; the ground is wet, dark and strangely calm, just as in Gambia when the storm clears.

You feel black pepper over damp earth, with aidan fruit and vanilla warming as the sun returns. Coffee, vetiver and leather rise like steam from stone, stirred with thiouraye (thurai) incense that curls around you like quiet smoke. It feels as if an old keeper of stories hides in the palms, dressed in bark and leaves, seen only by circling vultures.

You might reach for it on reflective evenings, cool rainy days or whenever you want something grounded, intimate and a little mysterious.

• Maya Njie

Maya Njie treats perfume as inherited memory. Self-taught, the practice grew through experimentation — raw materials, essential oils, aroma compounds, and resins worked into compositions that trace a dual Swedish and Gambian heritage. The source material is personal: an archive of family photographs, a Swedish summer house, a grandparent's quiet flat, a wedding remembered in fragments. Each scent reconstructs a place, a person, a moment otherwise left to fade.

The results read as deeply personal yet strangely universal — accords nostalgic in tone, formulations that feel contemporary in execution. Each fragrance is conceived to operate as a souvenir, carrying its original association while taking on new meaning for whoever wears it next. The full range is formulated vegan, extending the same care given to memory to the materials themselves.