Maker profile
d'Annam: rice, coffee and a place on the Art and Olfaction shortlist
The Vietnamese house reached the Independent category of the 12th Art and Olfaction Awards with ink and whisky, but its everyday catalogue is a…
4 min read
Undernotes
The Journal
22 piecesMon / Wed / FriRSS
Reading about independent perfume: what the season smells like, who is making what, and how one material behaves in a hundred different hands.
Seasonal
The autumn equinox switch: from citrus to amber
The library holds 153 citrus fragrances and 95 aquatic ones against 199 built on amber, and three small houses show how that crossover is made note by…
4 min read
Trend
The newest houses lean resinous: labdanum, clove, frankincense
Nine houses joined the library in the last 45 days, eight of them on 13 September, and their note lists run to resin and spice rather than sugar.
4 min read
Maker profile
Deep Midnight Perfumes after Cat Marx: what the house kept and changed
Cat Marx made perfume oils from 1996 and opened the Minneapolis shop in 2010; since her death in 2020, her business partner John has run it with her…
5 min read
Dispatch
What the EU's expanded allergen list means for small natural houses
Since 31 July, cosmetics placed on the EU market have had to declare roughly 80 fragrance allergens instead of 26, and many of the new entries are…
4 min read
Roundup
The oil houses that built the goth-perfume aesthetic
Graveyard dirt, copal and fog machine were ordinary catalogue notes at four small American houses long before the seasonal spooky-scent roundups…
4 min read
Beginner guide
Perfume oil, attar, extrait, EDP: what the label actually tells you
Concentration words are house conventions rather than measurements, so the useful reading is format, size and price per millilitre.
4 min read
Trend
Gourmand oud isn't new: the indie attar houses never left it
Trend forecasts have made sweetened oud the defining move of 2026, but Al Shareef Oudh, Olfa Originals and Fort & Manlé have treated vanilla-and-amber…
5 min read
Seasonal
Early autumn in the oil houses is roasted, not sweet
The equinox lands on 22 September, and three American oil houses treat the season as damp earth, resin and smoke, with sugar used only as seasoning.
4 min read
Note deep dive
What 'ambergris' means on an attar's ingredient list
Whale-derived material runs past $100,000 a kilogram and cannot legally be traded in the US; the synthetic that replaced it costs a few hundred.
4 min read
About the journal
Three mornings a week the journal publishes one piece about independent perfume, drawn from the same catalogue as the rest of the site: 22 articles so far, every one of them linking back to the houses and the notes it talks about. It is published by Undernotes; nothing in it is sponsored, and no link is an affiliate link.