There is a moment just after midnight when the city finally exhales.
Lulu Ar
Teacher. Dreamer. Brand owner.
Filosophia · Cimahi, Indonesia
He spends his days teaching people how to grow and his nights trying to stop a feeling from leaving. Part one is Lulu. Part two is Filosophia, the house he built to hold what he could not say out loud.
Every scent begins with a story before it becomes a formula. He says this about perfume. He also, without appearing to notice, says it about people.
Lulu Ar · Cimahi · 2026
Lulu Ar teaches for a living, which means he spends his days on the slowest and least fashionable subject there is: how a person grows. Somewhere in the middle of that he found perfumery, and it changed the way he says things. Not what he wanted to say. How.
He will tell you that a scent preserves what memory alone cannot hold, and that this is why he keeps making them. Not to capture a smell. To keep a feeling from leaving the room. That is a strange thing to say about a craft that ends in grams and percentages, and it turns out to be the most practical sentence in this interview, because it is also his method, and it runs in exactly that order. Story first. Feeling second. Formula last.
The file
The soundtrack
The playlist he says describes him. It belongs to the second half of the day.
Two rooms, one question
I have always been fascinated by how people grow.
As a teacher, I spend my days helping students understand the world with curiosity and empathy. Along the way I discovered perfumery, and it quietly transformed the way I express ideas. I realised that fragrance could carry emotions and preserve memories in ways words sometimes cannot.
Starting my own fragrance brand taught me patience. Every scent begins with a story before it becomes a formula. Whether I am designing a lesson or blending raw materials, I am always asking the same question: how do I make this experience stay with someone?
I still consider myself a dreamer. I simply enjoy turning those dreams into something people can experience.
Something you live with
I used to think fragrance was something you wore. Over time, I realised it was something you lived with.
A scent has a quiet way of preserving moments that memory alone cannot hold. Sometimes it reminds us of a place. Sometimes a person. More often, it reminds us of a version of ourselves we thought we had left behind.
That is why I keep creating. Not to capture a smell, but to preserve a feeling before it disappears.
Not to capture a smell, but to preserve a feeling before it disappears.Lulu Ar · on why he keeps making them
The slowest subject
Before the perfume there was a classroom, and the thing he says he has always been fascinated by is how a person grows. So: one student, one year, five moments where a teacher has to decide something. Both answers are defensible. Only one of them is quick.
They answer wrong, out loud, in front of everyone.
Just after midnight
There is a moment just after midnight when the city finally exhales.
The streets grow quieter, the air feels cooler, and somewhere in the distance you hear the call to prayer blending with the last echoes of the night. It is peaceful, slightly mysterious, and deeply grounding.
Two registers
These days I move between Creed Millésime Impérial and my own Strangers in the Night.
Millésime Impérial reminds me to stay light and present. It has a quiet elegance that never asks for attention. When the day slows down, I reach for Strangers in the Night. It is the fragrance I wear when I want to think, write, or simply sit with my own thoughts.
The light through the window
I simply watch the light change through the window. Those quiet moments remind me that clarity rarely arrives in noise.
Grace without noise
Grace without noise.
Three words. He did not offer a fourth, and after some thought we decided not to ask for one.
People grow when they are trusted
I have watched students grow because someone believed in them before they believed in themselves, and I have seen customers connect with fragrances because they tell honest stories rather than perfect ones.
Whether in education or business, I believe authenticity always lasts longer than attention.
Grace without noise
He answered the question about good taste in three words and offered nothing further. So this is the argument he did not make. Take things away and watch what happens to what is left. A formula, a lesson and a sentence all fail in the same direction, and it is never for want of material.
Sixty-four things, every one of them true.
Nothing here is wrong. That is the difficulty. This is what a first draft smells like and what a first lesson plan looks like: everything he knows, arranged in the order he happened to learn it.
This is the answer he gaveStory, feeling, formula
This is the order he works in, and he insists it is never the other way round. Choose a story and watch it travel. Three of these four paths end at a bottle that actually exists. One of them does not, which is the honest part.
Recognition
Authenticity always lasts longer than attention.
Lulu Ar · Cimahi · Issue Thirty-Seven
At Filosophia, every fragrance begins with a story before it becomes a scent.
Two of the three are standards. Strangers in the Night. Fly Me To The Moon. The third is called 420 and is not a song at all, which is the first hint that this house is not running a theme so much as keeping a mood: late, unhurried, a little smoky, addressed to one person rather than a room.
One more thing about how this house works, and it is not in his answers. Two of the three below were made with Edrin Wangi, who is not a perfumer and does not own a brand. The composing is done by Eldwen Wang. Filosophia’s method, then, looks a great deal like its founder’s: find the person who can say the thing, and trust them with it.
What follows is the catalogue as Filosophia describes it, with the pyramids exactly as the house publishes them, and a few things the house has said elsewhere.
The house, from outside the interview
The three songs
Pick one. The room changes colour, the pictures change, and the pyramid builds from the top down, which is the order you actually meet a perfume in.
Strangers in the Night
So close, yet too far.
A familiar stranger. A scent inspired by those rare moments when someone you have just met feels like a memory you have always carried.
Some guide us forward. Some ask us to begin again.
The upcoming release looks beyond the dawn. That is all Filosophia will say about it for now, and given how this house works, the sentence is probably the brief.
It is worth noticing what is missing from every description above. Nobody claims the perfume will make you interesting. The claims are all about what the wearer already carries: a stranger who feels familiar, a night that ran long, a room that finally went quiet.
I still consider myself a dreamer. I simply enjoy turning those dreams into something people can experience.
Interview by HoM Haute · Photographs and artwork courtesy of Filosophia · Cimahi, 2026
Harum Oleh Memori
HoM Haute · Interviews · No. 37