Imagine for a moment wandering by one of the medicine shops whose rolling metal shutters gape open around Keefer Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown. The first thing you might experience is the scent: fennel, black cardamom, sweet-and-bitter licorice root, astringent green tea, tingling Sichuan peppercorn, briny seaweed, and salted dried whelk. Depending who you are and where you grew up, the smell might be overpowering, delightful, or foreign. It might smell like food or medicine or poison. It might smell like home.
This insight—that the emotional impact of scent is tied to who you are and where you grew up—propels the idea behind Vancouver perfumery startup Meridian, a one-woman operation run by governance consultant Jenn Fong. Meridian brings in a selection of fragrances from around the world, from outside of the usual celebrated European perfumeries, and from underrepresented cultures, perspectives, and perfumers, and delivers them to Canadians through an online shop.
“What you think smells good or not good is grounded in early experiences,” Fong says over the phone. “Why do I think that bitter melon is totally fine to eat, but someone else would think, ‘That’s horrendous’?”
Take one of Meridian’s selections, Guangzhou perfume brand Soulvent, whose formulation Crimson Snow blends aged tea, tangerine peel, and glutinous rice. To the Chinese olfactory imagination, these three are a natural combination, evoking the traditional aging of tea inside tangerine peels that have been dried while stuffed with rice. In Crimson Snow, they are blended with hawthorne, vetiver, and pear for a winter bouquet.
Crimson Snow “was completely eye-opening to me. I never knew perfume could smell like this, could smell like things of my culture, like things of my scent memory,” Fong says. “I thought, why do we only have access to one very small segment of what perfumery is?”
Fong first encountered the breadth of Chinese perfume at the Notes Shanghai perfumery exhibition, which last year welcomed over 200 brands, from inside and outside China. The exhibitors included French, Italian, English, and Korean labels trying to break into the Chinese market, Chinese brands with scents designed by prestigious European perfumers, and homegrown Chinese workshops going it alone. Some of the international brands, she says, struggled to make an impact with Chinese noses, which were looking for subtler, lower-key scents. As one brand rep told an Italian perfumer at the show, Fong says: “It isn’t going to work. Chinese people don’t want this cloud of sugary, dense, milky sweetness around them.”
But Fong did love some perfumes that were marriages between east and west, such as from Shanghai perfumery Documents, whose scholarly-packaged fragrances are designed by French perfumer Yann Vasnier, who has worked with the likes of Marc Jacobs and Comme des Garçons. Documents’ perfume Naive has notes common to both worlds, including bitter orange, gardenia, and rosemary.
“That was one of the ones, when I smelled it, I thought, whoa, where has this been?” Fong says.
But for a deeper, more unmistakably Asian cut, you might have to turn to a homegrown Chinese studio. Take the unforgettably named Waveman Kong (a.k.a. Big Buddha) of Damfool perfume, who has created equally unforgettable scents such as Yak Travelling Troop, which includes moss, black pepper, cinnamon, and an extract of yak dung.
“I had never in my life smelled something like this before,” Fong says. “I wouldn’t personally wear it as a perfume, but as an artistic thing, that’s awesome. You have met your creative brief for the story you want to tell olfactively.”
Meridian’s small collection reflects the difficulty of getting some of these perfumes, many of which were never intended for export, into Canada. Fong describes late nights on WeChat video calls with confused Chinese perfumery owners, Google Translate open on her lap. But her lineup includes perfumes drawing on Lebanese, Egyptian, Indian, and Burmese scent traditions—as well as, of course, Chinese.
Fong hopes, in Canada, to open other people’s eyes, and noses, to scents that speak to their own memories, in the same way that Crimson Snow spoke to her. “If I had known about all these things, maybe I would have felt like perfume as a product was for me,” she says.
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