Darwin
Nobody handed him this. No mother with a collection, no shelf he grew up next to. He got curious, bought things, compared them, and kept going until curiosity turned into an actual education. Fifty conversations into this series, he is the first to have arrived entirely on his own.
He is also wearing two Guerlains at the moment that are, without his having planned it, the same argument twice: a bright thing set against a dark one. Which is what his own photographs are, too.
He got curious, and the curiosity did not stop
"I didn't really grow up around perfume or have any particular background in fragrance. It was something I discovered on my own later, mostly out of curiosity. At first, I just wanted to find fragrances that I liked. But the more I tried, the more curious I became about different houses, notes, ingredients, and how a fragrance changes from the opening to the drydown."
That last clause is where people either stop or do not. Most wearers experience a fragrance as one smell, the one it has in the first ten minutes, and buy or reject it on that. Noticing that it moves is the moment the hobby turns into a subject, because a fragrance is not an object at all. It is a sequence of things evaporating at different speeds, and the composition is the order they leave in.
"Over time, it became less about simply smelling good and more about appreciating the character of a fragrance and what makes one composition different from another."
Opening to drydown
one wearing, ten hoursThe two he is wearing are the same argument twice
"Guerlain has been getting quite a lot of wear from me lately, Angélique Noire and Néroli Outrenoir. Then there's Cadence Engine No. 9 and Cadence Your Guardian Angel, which put me in a completely different mood. I don't really like wearing the same kind of fragrance all the time. I tend to choose based on my mood, the weather, or simply what I feel like smelling that day."
Look at the two Guerlains next to each other. Angélique Noire is angelica, which is green and bitter and faintly medicinal, the stem rather than the flower, set against vanilla. The house calls it a choreography of opposites and says the idea came from Swan Lake. Néroli Outrenoir is neroli lit by bergamot and petitgrain and then walked straight into smoked black tea. Thierry Wasser named it for Pierre Soulages, the painter who spent decades on canvases so black they stopped being dark and became a way of throwing light back at you.
He did not pick those two because they rhyme. He picked them because he liked them. They rhyme anyway.
The light and the shadow
drag acrossAngélique Noire
Néroli Outrenoir
Cadence pulls him somewhere else entirely, which he says plainly, and that is the other half of how he wears things. Two houses, four bottles, no single register. He is not building a signature. He is keeping a range.
He sent one trip, photographed at three hours
"I don't think there's one particular scent that takes me back to one specific person or place. For me, it's more about the atmosphere a fragrance can create. Sometimes I'll smell something and it suddenly feels familiar, even if I can't immediately place why. It can bring back a certain feeling, a time in your life, or even just the atmosphere of a particular moment."
Which is a more honest description of how smell and memory actually work than the version everybody repeats. The madeleine story has convinced two centuries of people that a scent should deliver a specific afternoon in high definition. Mostly it does not. Mostly it delivers a temperature, a quality of light, a mood you cannot source, and then leaves you holding it.
The same water, three times
drag the day
"You can't really see or hold it, but somehow it can keep a memory alive."DARWIN
Two small things, in order, before anyone else gets a say
"Coffee is a must, it's usually the first thing I have before I properly start the day. After that, I like taking a quiet moment to choose a fragrance. I'll think about what I feel like wearing that day. Sometimes it's something familiar and comforting; other times, I'll choose something simply because it feels right that morning."
"And I like that neither coffee nor perfume has to be for anyone else. They're little things I do for myself, to enjoy, slow down for a moment, and start the day with something I genuinely love."
Note the sequence. The coffee is not a warm-up to the perfume, it is the thing that makes the room quiet enough to choose one. Almost nobody puts a decision at the start of the day that has no consequences. That is the whole point of this one.
Seven in the morning
no labelsThree conditions, three moods, nine mornings
He said he chooses on mood, weather, or nothing more defensible than what he feels like smelling. In Jakarta the weather half of that is not a small variable. Heat and humidity rewrite a formula before you have left the building, and the air conditioning inside rewrites it back.
What to reach for
pick a squareGood taste, and the case for standing still
"I think good taste is pretty simple. It's knowing what you genuinely like and not feeling the need to follow what's trending or what everyone else is into. For me, it's about choosing things that feel right, look good, and are well made. When I find something I really like, I'm happy to keep coming back to it."
"I also think good taste comes with taking your time. You don't always have to move on to the next thing. Sometimes it's nice to really enjoy what you already have."
This is an unfashionable position in a hobby that runs on newness, and it is the correct one. A collection is not the number of bottles that passed through your hands. It is the small number you reached for twice.
The ones you went back to
twelve bottles, one yearSeven links, and not one of them is a cool pick
He did not send a playlist. He sent seven separate links, which is a different kind of answer, and the shape of them is the most revealing thing in this interview. A Westlife compilation. Shane Filan. The Aerosmith ballad from Armageddon. And then three quiet new singles by artists almost nobody has heard of.
Big sincere ballads and small soft songs, with nothing in between and nothing chosen to look good in a list. Which is, word for word, his own definition of taste, arriving in a completely different medium.