First Touch

The pallor of adulthood evaporates.

What is left is a white world of innocence and tenderness. The birth of a daughter set Tianle Feng looking at the world afresh. Childhood cannot be lived twice, but through a child's eyes the world can be read with goodwill again.

Yuzu stands for the child, bittersweet, lovely and unique. Native to the Yangtze River valley, it reached Japan by way of the Korean Peninsula in the Nara period, and it belongs more to the kitchen than to the bottle. Milk and honey sit with musk, warm and sweet, like the natural smell of a small child.

Watermelon comes in fresh and lively beside the yuzu. Lily of the valley and begonia are clean and airy, with lilac next to them. Haitian vetiver stays low and understated, the father in the picture, steady and reliable.

Voice From The Sky, Tianle in Chinese, is boundless space and imagination, the fragrance house of Tianle Feng. Feng is a second-generation maker born in China who spent much of childhood in the family fragrance lab, immersed in that world. The house turns lived experience into fragrance, drawing on a diverse range of artistic and cultural backgrounds. The work is warm, emotional, deeply personal and reflective.

Making fragrance is where Feng, sometimes lost, finds a true self again. Each release sets down a moment, a surprise, a reflection, a loss or a dream: a lion waking on the Serengeti, a daughter's birth, drinking alone beneath the moon in a Su Shi poem, a three-year-old's favourite strawberry. Every one is shared in the hope of bringing a little comfort along the way.