Starlight Sesame

Mid-January in Maharashtra, the sun climbs higher and the cold air fills with woodsmoke and song. 

This is the festival of Sankrant, when longer days are welcomed with bonfires, kites stitched across the sky, and sweets pressed from sesame and raw jaggery, shared hand to hand among neighbors. The first breath is bright and green, bergamot lifted by cool narcissus petals, before warm toasted sesame settles onto a soft pillow of tonka. Then comes the slow gold of jaggery, honey, and labdanum, round and glowing, like sitting close to a fire while frost still edges the morning. Nutty and sweet without ever turning heavy, it carries the kind of warmth that feels like an arm around the shoulder, a small celebration of abundance held through the coldest stretch of the year.

• Anjali Vandemark

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.