The hidden patterns
of you
About Us
Rooted in generations of craft and an intimate understanding and appreciation for nature's offerings
Our work began long before The Olfactory took shape – rooted in generations of craft, care, and an intimate understanding of nature’s offerings.
The art of hexiang (合香) – the deliberate fusion of aromatic materials – has been refined across dynasties as both ritual and personal expression. During the Song dynasty, among the literati, the four refined arts “闻香、斗茶、插花、挂画” – roughly translated to “Appreciating Scent, Tea Competitions, Flower Arranging, and Hanging Scrolls” – were especially popular, each elevated to the pinnacle of elegance. Burning and savoring incense, like tea, were indispensable activities in a literatus’s life – friends gathered to playing with incense and engage in incense competitions. Scent was used to welcome guests, reveal character, and foster heartfelt connections. Practitioners gathered to showcase fragrant compositions of finely ground botanicals, resins, and oils formed into spheres, discs, and strings of beads – these were to be carried close for protection, comfort, and as intimate signatures of identity. At its core, scent and incense reflected a spiritual pursuit of tranquility and introspection. As observed by sinologist and historian Edward H. Schafer: there was little clear-cut distinction among drugs, spices, perfumes, and incenses – that is, among substances which nourish the body and those which nourish the spirit, those which attract a lover and those which attract a divinity.
In regions where The Olfactory’s roots lie, this spirit and practice was preserved and passed down as expertise and craft. We honor that lineage here, drawing on methods refined through time while building something new.
Our approach is shaped by diverse expertise: backgrounds spanning medicine and public health, computational science and bioinformatics, law, design, and fragrance composition. We are inspired and surrounded by, and continue our mentors’ and families’ collective heritage of practitioners of both Western and traditional medicine, haute couture artisans who worked with silk for royal families and premier fashion houses, and craftspeople who understood raw materials at their deepest level – what they can become when handled with precision and imagination.
The Olfactory was born across Hong Kong, Singapore, and Zhuhai – cities that allow us proximity to exceptional botanicals and the research infrastructure needed to develop our proprietary assessment methodology. Influences from years spent in Japan and Southeast Asia further refined our commitment to quality, subtlety, and craft.
Understanding you, to design and create to you
The Core-Season Assessment
There are patterns woven through everything – in the spiral of a shell, the symmetry of a flower, the rhythm of breath, and you.
The Core-Season Assessment explores identity inspired by and based on the wisdom of nature, recognising that we are fundamentally part of nature, regardless of our modern advancements and adventures of today, and that nature thus holds and will always hold invaluable guidance to our understanding of ourselves and our world.
Drawing from modern psychology and traditional wellness, the Core-Season assessment primarily and simultaneously measures two dimensions and their interaction – your foundational nature (or Core, roughly representative of your core personality traits and identity and relating to modern psychology and personality science) and your present state of wellbeing and wellness (or Season, roughly representative of your physical and psychological wellbeing and relating to the Traditional Chinese Medicine concept of body constitutions) – which are intertwined and influence each other to form a fuller picture of who you are today.
While guided by existing validated personality frameworks, this assessment and methodology builds upon them by, in particular, revolving around the core understanding that identity is something both constant and evolving, rooted yet responsive, and can only be properly understood if expression of identity is considered as well, in and of itself apart from the underlying identity. Many existing personality assessments, for example, assess mostly the behaviour, lifestyle, practices and/or current preferences of the foregoing of the individual, and from them perhaps erroneously or inaccurately conclude on the personality/identity of the individual. They overlook and thus do not account for an individual’s personality/identity not being the same as their present behaviour, lifestyle, practices and/or preferences, the gaps between the two, and what causes such gaps (i.e. namely, the individual’s overall state of wellbeing – one of the most significant factors, if not the most, influencing a person’s expression of their personality/identity). The Core-Season methodology builds upon existing research and personality frameworks to account for the crucial interplay between core personality traits (including beliefs, values, motivators, etc.) and holistic wellbeing and wellness, allowing for a deeper and potentially more meaningful understanding of personality and identity, alongside consideration of behavioural, environmental, and other external factors (e.g. by possibly mitigating the impact of attributional errors).
Unlike existing frameworks, the Core-Season methodology also utilises a multi-dimensional approach consisting disciplines oft not considered together, despite their extreme complementariness and the invaluable insights they provide when considered in tandem – in particular, traditional wellness / medicine knowledge domains (e.g. Traditional Chinese Medicine), modern wellness practices, and modern psychology and personality science. Additionally, the methodology also considers cross-cultural norms and replication, and that while who you are at your core remains more or less consistent, your expression of it shifts with your energy, balance, and season of life, and is designed for repeated taking.
In a world where too much is overcomplicated, surface, uniform, and forgetful of our innate tendency and need for meaningful connection and nature (e.g. the biophilia hypothesis (or BET) suggests that humans possess an innate tendency to seek connections with nature and other forms of life), the Core-Season methodology and assessment and the Olfactory were born after years of research and dedication to the human condition, the meaning of identity, self-expression, self-exploration, and growth – to understand, to fight, and to heal.
A thorough and meaningful understanding of you – so that we are able to create and design one-of-a-kind to you, for you.
Scent, all along
Scent is the most honest and intimate form of communication, expression, and connection – and the deepest and most instinctual understanding of yourself and others. It speaks to the parts of your brain where memory lives, where emotion forms, and where you know who you are before language tells you otherwise. It decorates time, space, memories and experiences, and aligns you with your truest self.
A breath is all it takes – you feel home, you miss an old friend, you calm down, you get fired up, you love it, you hate it – it hits you, you have no doubt, you do not need to think.
At The Olfactory, we design scents that honour your complexity, knowing that scents are never just scents.
From your Core-Season profile, we design and create scent formulations representing who you are in this season – one-of-a-kind personalisation, rooted in heritage, informed by research, expressed through craft. Each creation considers quality, complexity, and intention. Some pieces are made for ritual – wearable, grounding you throughout your day. Others are made for skin – perfumes that evolve with your chemistry.
The Carried Close Collection
Scent has always been more than decoration. Across cultures, aromatic talismans were carried close – for courage, protection, healing, identity, home, memory, love. We honour that lineage while bringing it forward.
Your scent becomes part of how you move through the world. An invisible signature, a daily anchor. Something that supports you from within while expressing who you are without.
We make jewelry to hold your scent – through your battles and your peace, your exploration and your rest.
Carried Close.
Coming Soon.