Perfume Who: Brooklyn Studio Blends Scent with Surrealist Imagery

Perfume Who, an independent fragrance studio founded in Brooklyn by Taiwanese perfumer and artist Hannah Wu, treats scent as a narrative device rather than a luxury product. The studio's work is documented in photographs by Andriy Shurpin and Valerie Sagura, which place the bottle within surreal ecosystems—resting against a shell, intertwined with branches, or surrounded by leaves and petals. Each bottle is sealed with a handcrafted plaster egg that is intentionally cracked; the cracks are not hidden but become part of the object's identity. The stopper is porous, absorbing the fragrance and slowly releasing it, turning the packaging into a small olfactory sculpture. The scents reference experimental cinema: Meshes of the Afternoon takes its name from the 1943 film by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, while The Very Eye of Night also draws on Deren's universe. Rather than translating a film literally, Perfume Who asks what remains of an image once the image is removed. Notes such as fig, rose, honey, dry grass, violet, and white musk become fragments of mental landscapes. In Mothlight, damp earth, matsutake mushroom, moss, and sandalwood evoke a forest floor without revealing it; At Land moves from seaweed and driftwood to oud, tobacco, and incense. The studio focuses less on perfumery than on sensory memory, creating invisible frames that continue off-screen.