London Rain

Mr. Shelter is built for weather and takes his time in it.

Rain comes down gently over the streets of London, the air staying fresh, and running through it the sweet warmth of hot chocolate — two things that should not share an afternoon, keeping each other company anyway. Cocoa takes the cool edge off the rain without ever turning heavy. Everything moves at a walking pace. The blue of it is a relaxing blue, freshness and depth folded together, calm arriving before anything else does. Calm amidst rain, sweet escape, an embrace of serenity: that is the character, and the mood holds.

The chaos of the day gets left a few streets back.

A note on labelling: this fragrance is formulated at extrait de parfum strength. The bottle and box read eau de parfum, as the packaging was produced before the current formulation.

• Antonio Lasheras

Pills started where the training should have been. Antonio Lasheras spent years inside olfactory marketing making scents for other companies, and the shortages never let up. Instruction barely existed. Classic and modern formulas were hard to study, the raw materials harder still to get hold of, so the learning happened alone. Mallo, a house of handmade limited compositions, came out of that. Pills was built with Teresa Klus as a lab where creators develop ideas without being told no.

Every Pills fragrance carries a color, since the house gives each emotion a hue. Green belongs to what's untamed and free. Blue holds freshness and depth at once. Collections arrive with their own illustrations and invented characters, worked out with graphic design studios. The perfumes aren't built to be liked by everyone. They're built to provoke, and that suits the people they're made for.