Golden Cocoa

Somewhere in a sun-warmed kitchen, dates glisten under gold foil and chocolate waits to be shared.

This is a love letter to Jallab, the cold Lebanese drink poured at the close of a long fasting day, when family gathers and the room fills with bright laughter. The first impression is fruity and lightly spiced, almost sparkling, like cool syrup over crushed ice. Cocoa warms through next, softened toward white chocolate, with honey and tonka lending a smooth, sweet richness. Cinnamon and cardamom keep it playful, while rose and a thread of pine wood round the edges. It feels like a dessert made for celebration, yet light enough for an ordinary afternoon — a small, sunlit moment of summer joy.

• Nour Akoum

Scent Trunk started in Toronto in 2015 with a straightforward ambition: make bespoke perfumery accessible. What grew from that idea is something less easily categorized — a fragrance platform governed by an olfactive council that maps out an annual creative calendar, drawing on trend forecasts across art, fashion, food, and travel while giving its commissioned perfumers genuine creative latitude. Each release is tied to a seasonal focus ingredient and the places and cultures it comes from, with artists ranging from classically trained perfumers to musicians, painters, and digital creators working in scent for the first time.

Today, Scent Trunk's Original Editions form the core of what the brand puts into the world — fragrances conceived by a global roster of independent noses, spanning continents and career paths, equally at home with the self-taught and the academically trained. Seasonal, collaborative, and editorially driven, Scent Trunk operates as much like a fragrance publisher as a perfume house.