White Fountain

A Bay Area morning, just before daybreak.

Water still sitting on everything and the cold not off the air. Nothing loud, nothing decided, and already full of life.

Mandarin and pink pepper carry the cold. Iris takes the weight, luminous and powdery, and muguet runs a thin green line behind them.

Denser and more airy at the same time. The musks are modern and synthetic, and named as such.

Melloculab is run by chemical engineers and it argues with the industry it sells into. Natural is not automatically better. Some of the most allergenic compounds in a bottle come from natural sources. So the synthetics get named rather than hidden, the ingredient list is published in full and the concentration with it, and the words clean, natural and vegan are refused for having stopped carrying information.

Blau is the house colour, a blue drawn from local traditions that once used it against mumps. Science says otherwise and Melloculab keeps it anyway, for what a colour can hold rather than what it can do. The oud is named by where it grew and so is the patchouli. The caps are finished by hand in Indonesia, so no two match and none matches the display piece.