“My background is rather ironic when I think about it. I was trained as an engineer, yet somehow found myself working as finance staff, so I have grown accustomed to a world where almost everything is measured, calculated, and reduced to numbers. Fragrance became the beautiful contradiction to that part of me.”

“Somewhere along the way, collecting perfumes became more than simply collecting bottles. Through fragrance I began meeting people, listening to different perspectives, and discovering that the same scent can tell an entirely different story to every person who wears it. That was when I realised fragrance could be another language, a language without words, capable of expressing memories, emotions, places, and even versions of ourselves that we can no longer return to. Now I live somewhere between spreadsheets and scent strips, between numbers and memories. Perhaps that contrast is the most honest description of who I am.”

“At first, fragrance was simply about smelling good. Over time, it became a way of remembering. I began to see perfume not as something I wear, but as something I keep: a feeling, a place, a person, captured in scent.”

“Because sometimes, the most beautiful memories are the ones we can smell.”

“Acqua di Giò is probably the fragrance that holds the deepest place in my memory. It was my father’s fragrance. When I was a child, it was simply the smell of my father. He wore it almost every day, until the very end of his life. I never realised how deeply a scent could become attached to a person until I lost him.”

“Perhaps that is why, until today, I own almost every flanker of Acqua di Giò except the original Eau de Toilette. And the reason is quite simple: I am afraid. I am afraid of what will happen when that familiar scent touches my skin again. Afraid that, for a moment, everything I have spent years learning to live without might come rushing back. I am still gathering the courage to buy that bottle. Maybe one day I will finally spray it on my skin. But I already know what will probably happen. I will close my eyes. And I will cry.”

“Lately I have been revisiting some of the designer fragrances that had been sitting patiently in my collection for a while: Dior Homme Intense, Terre d’Hermès, Guerlain Shalimar, and Bvlgari Tygar. There is something beautiful about returning to an old fragrance. You may remember the scent, but you never return as the same person who wore it before.”

“And there is one particular reason I found myself wearing Dior Homme Intense again: a gift from Om Reza of HoM Haute, Paradise Tokyo. Sometimes, a fragrance comes back into your life not because you were searching for it, but because someone else reminds you why you loved it in the first place.”

“Before I leave for work, there are a few things I never want to skip. A small kiss for my wife, a kiss for my newborn baby, coffee in the morning. And, admittedly, my nicotine ritual.”

“The first two remind me why I leave home every morning. The latter two help me negotiate with the fact that I have to. There is something comforting about these small rituals. They are ordinary, almost insignificant from the outside, but they quietly anchor me to the people and routines that make a life feel like mine.”

“Good taste is the ability to know when something is enough. It is not about owning the rarest bottle, the most expensive ingredients, or a fragrance that smells unlike anything else. It is about knowing what belongs to you and having the confidence to wear it, even when nobody else understands why.”

“For me, good taste is intimacy rather than extravagance. It is knowing yourself well enough to recognise what feels right, and being comfortable enough in your own skin not to constantly search for something more. Something beautiful does not need to announce that it is beautiful. It simply exists, and lets you discover it.”

“I believe fragrance is personal, not because everyone smells differently, but because everyone remembers differently. A perfume may be beautiful to one person and meaningless to another. What matters is the story it awakens in you.”

“Sometimes, we keep a scent not because the memory was beautiful, but because it was ours.”

“I think fragrance is one of the few things we can wear that cannot truly be seen. And perhaps that is why it feels so intimate. A bottle can be beautiful. A composition can be technically perfect. But in the end, fragrance only becomes meaningful when it meets a human life. We wear it to work, to dinner, on ordinary mornings, and on nights we know we will remember. We wear it when we fall in love, when we are trying to forget, when we are mourning, and when we are becoming someone new. And years later, a single unexpected breath of that familiar scent can bring everything back. A room, a season, a city, a person, and a version of ourselves we thought we had already left behind.”

“Maybe that is what fragrance really means to me. It is not simply about smelling good. It is about preserving something that time was supposed to take away.”