Joyful Nostalgia

A hot spring in Japanese snow.

Levity and joy exist inside any hard season, and a personal retreat is one way to find them. A snowy mountain onsen, a natural hot spring, recovery as the point of going, physically and mentally. Yuzu is the primary material and everything else answers to it. Lemon and bergamot keep the citrus natural rather than sharpened. A molecular jasmine adds the softness that emotional times need. Warm green and shiso run vivid underneath, and the delicate profile gets bolstered rather than covered. Aged soft woods carry the sophistication that naturals and Japanese subtlety are supposed to produce. Blended to jazz kissa.

Scent Trunk commissions its fragrances one at a time from independent noses working across the world, and prints their names on the page beside the work. It looks for cultural heterogeneity and industry experience, and works with the self-taught as readily as the academically trained, the bootstrapping entrepreneur as readily as the corporate nose. Each year it also picks unconventional noses, chefs or writers or musicians with an exceptional creative streak.

Most releases name one material as their focus and one place as their provenance, and each carries a signed passage in which the person who made it says what they were after. Winternights is hay cured on Swedish poles. Tears and Smiles is pineapple cake and oolong in Taiwan. Stroopwafel is a canal house in Amsterdam with tulips on the table. The material and the place come first, and the writing follows them.