Hinoki, yuzu, matcha, rice.
Japanese notes have moved from a niche curiosity to a fixture of the fragrance world, used by luxury houses such as Le Labo and independent scent brands from London to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
And for anyone shopping for a gift, that is good news: Fragrance is a risky present, but these notes tend to be more discreet.
“They’re not as loud and strong and in your face,” said Laura Bass, the sales and marketing coordinator at Lore Perfumery in the Fitzroy section of Melbourne. As gifts, “they’re safer.”
The interest in Japanese-inspired fragrances isn’t entirely new. Ms. Bass said customers had been drawn to notes such as yuzu and the cypress scent hinoki for years. “But lately, matcha and rice have been super popular.”
Part of the appeal, she said, is the continuing popularity of gourmand fragrances. “It’s a response to people wanting to smell edible, but I think matcha and rice offer a less sweet, nonvanilla or sugar alternative,” she said. The matcha craze hasn’t hurt either.
“Niche perfumery has grown enormously in the last five years,” she said, “and as a result, what we’re dealing with is a more educated consumer who wants something that is different to traditional French perfumery styling. And I think that Japanese ingredients such as hinoki, rice, shiso, cherry blossom offer a scent profile that is a little bit different to French perfumery in that it’s a little bit more subtle, more minimalist and therefore more wearable.”
An Unexpected Canvas
Le Labo, the New York house best known for Santal 33, introduced its ode to green tea in 2021 with Thé Matcha 26 (15 milliliters, $113; other sizes available) long before people started queuing for matcha lattes.
“The Japanese principles of wabi-sabi — the impermanence of all things, material integrity and raw, imperfect beauty — are foundational to Le Labo,” Deborah Royer, the brand’s global creative and olfactive director, wrote in an email. “I’d spent years exploring green tea variations before matcha opened up a completely unexpected olfactive canvas. It speaks to a long dialogue with Japanese ingredients that run through many of our scents, with elements like hinoki, cypress, florals and incense remaining cherished sources of sensorial, tactile and visual possibility that we continually return to.”
Japanese notes have also been turning up in home fragrance. Daniel Patrick Giles, the founder of the Los Angeles fragrance brand Perfumehead, pointed to Separate Rooms ($95, 100 milliliters), his first room spray built around Japanese quince. “It’s bright, tart and almost citruslike, but also beautifully refined.”
Mr. Giles said that he believed there was a growing fascination with Japanese ingredients in fragrance because they were so different from traditional European scents.
“They don’t have to be loud to be effective,” he said. “They have the ability to feel both familiar and unexpected.”
Memories, Bottled
The idea for d’Annam, fragrances that celebrate Asian cultures, came to Nick Hoang in a Diptyque store in Tokyo.
A former tech worker who grew up in Vietnam, he was looking at the brand’s Do Son and Tam Dao scents, named for places in Vietnam — Do Son, a coastal town near Ha Long Bay, was near his childhood home. “I was just very moved by the power of storytelling of fragrance,” he said.
When he realized that the fragrance world was dominated by Western brands, “I thought, why don’t we tell these stories ourselves?” His first collection, nine scents capturing Vietnam, was created with the Vietnamese perfumer Anh Ngo and introduced in 2023.
Another nine scents in the Chapter 2: Memories of Japan collection followed in late 2024. Mr. Ngo and a Japanese culture consultant, Keita Hirose, collaborated on them. Most of the scents come in 50 milliliter sizes, for $160.
Some of the collection’s scents are playful, such as Strawberry Mochi, which pairs the fragrances of rice with orange flower. “The rice note in Strawberry Mochi is quite fluffy,” he said, “and when you spray it, you’ll get a sense of the bouncy mochi texture.”
Others are unexpected, such as Moonlight Samurai, which opens with sake. “Sake is very hard to capture because the top note flies away very fast,” he said. “The overall population don’t love scents that are too boozy, you have to do it in a finesse way, so the dry down is wildflowers and soft leather.”
As for the brand’s matcha note in Matcha Soft Serve, “The opening is quite bitter,” said Mr. Hoang. Many Western matcha perfumes, he said, soften the note with vanilla and sweet notes, but he said that his did not. “It’s a really fine line between appropriation and appreciation, and we try our best to do the latter, in a way that is really respectful to the culture,” he said.
Mr. Hoang recommended the Discovery Set: Memories of Japan ($59) as a gift option: “People with different tastes can really find something in there,” he said, from Sakura Snow for floral lovers to Tokyo Nights, built on the fragrances of the plum liquor umeshu and tobacco.
“We’re kind of paving the way for these ingredients to take a place,” he said. “In the past, they were in the background only.”
Fleeting Beauty
At Ormonde Jayne, the London perfume house founded by Linda Pilkington, Japan has been an influence for decades.
Her Sakura fragrance (88 milliliters, $245) begins with an unusual problem: Cherry blossoms are beautiful, but have virtually no scent. “It’s an eternal quest for perfumers and perfume houses to fill in the olfactory gap with their imagination of what that sight and moment could smell like, so all sakura scents are based on pure artistic fantasy,” Ms. Pilkington said.
For Sakura, she tracked down cherry blossom leaf oil from a scent supplier, noting that its green note balances the fragrance’s floral blend of rose, freesia, cyclamen and violet.
Then, “the perfumer Geza Schön turned up one day with a gift, a top accord created especially for me, which he called Sweet Linda,” she said. “At first, it stayed part of my library until the ideal of a sakura-inspired perfume took shape and then it just felt right. Its concept immediately diffused serene joy and calm, channeling hanami, Japan’s tradition of stopping to gaze at the cherry blossom and to appreciate the fleeting nature of beauty, and life’s ebb and flow.”
Another scent, Champaca (88 milliliters, $290), which turns 25 this month, pairs bamboo and green tea with rice, notes that came from her travels in East Asia. “The smell of brewing tea and cooking rice is omnipresent and it’s such a welcoming, comforting and simple aroma when you step into someone’s home,” she said.
Rice in a perfume drew many questions at the time: “I’m not sure it had ever been used before.” In that scent, “bamboo brings a green, airy freshness and sparkle, alongside the warmth from the tea and rice, it gives the composition space to breathe.” Now, she said, it is among the house’s most popular scents with customers younger than 30.
It also comes as a candle ($95). “It’s the olfactory equivalent of a big welcome banner the minute you step across the threshold,” she said. (Gift purchases include a 2.5-milliliter sample, she noted, so if the recipient is not happy with the scent, the unopened full-size bottle can be exchanged.)
Over the years people have responded to Champaca, Ms. Pilkington said, prompting her to think of an appropriate Japanese word.
“Natsukashii describes warm feelings of nostalgia,” she said, “and perfume can create that sensation when you encounter something for the first time, but feel you already know it.”
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