Tears and Smiles

Everything familiar, and nothing the same.

Homesickness sends a person back after decades away, and none of it holds. A piece of pineapple cake and a cup of hot oolong tea, in a gift box of mixed emotion. Ripe pineapple jam is bright, warm and jammy rather than fresh. A butter cookie sits beside it with flour still in the air. The oolong is freshly brewed, bittersweet and roasted enough to put the present back. Sandalwood and guaiacwood take it down, and silk musk and a paper accord stay behind. Thoughts about what if, and then adulthood, the so-called process of growing up. Nothing goes back.

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.