Nanyang | Maison de l'Asie

Unisex Neo-Chypre

Nanyang arrives with a label that does a lot of work before the first spray: Singapore, the Chinese diaspora, the South Seas, a house built in Grasse by a founder tracing her own heritage back to that part of the world. It is easy for a brief like that to collapse into travel-brochure perfumery, all postcard and no structure. Nanyang mostly avoids that trap, and it does so by traveling through and giving 40 decades on the skin.

Perfumer: Francois Merle-Baudoin

Launched: 2021

Notes Pyramid

Top: Lemon, bergamot, green tea, pepper

Heart: Incense, jasmine, saffron

Base: Leather, sandalwood, white musk, amber, vanilla

Scent Journey

The opening is very clean, very 1990s. Green tea, lemon, bergamot, humid air. It suggests Singapore, or at least the polished version of it: tropical gardens, white linen, iced tea sweating in a glass. For the first half-hour it stays light and almost weightless, sitting somewhere between CK One and the tea accord in Bvlgari Pour Homme. Fresh, minimal, pleasantly anonymous.

Then the citrus drops out.

At around the thirty-minute mark, the green tea turns darker and more bitter, closer to black tea: dry, smoky, faintly malty. The freshness loses its softness at the same time. Saffron and black pepper bring in something medicinal and dusty. Nanyang stops behaving like a simple tea cologne here. The structure gets heavier and harder to date.

The opening belonged to the 1990s. The heart already belongs to another decade.

The drydown settles into leather and sandalwood, and it is dry leather, not soft: smooth, somewhat austere, with the sandalwood adding weight rather than warmth. Over the following hours the fragrance takes on the rigid, slightly severe character of an 1980s chypre or leather.

Nanyang ages, the way a garment ages, from something new into something that has clearly been worn before.

And, with this one, I keep coming back to a single image while wearing it: the veranda of the Raffles Hotel, late 1980s, a storm building past the gardens.

Black tea cooling in a dark pot on the table. Beside it, a leather suitcase being opened, its smell dry and worn from years of travel. For a moment the 1990s opening and the 1980s drydown occupy the same room.

Two reference points from the same general era show their hand much earlier.

Ralph Lauren's Safari (1990) and Armani Eau Pour Homme (1984) both announce their woody, leathery core almost immediately.

Nanyang opens fresh, but moves through the bitter black tea, and only arrives at dry leather and sandalwood hours in.

Vert interesting and I like the idea that fragrances are reviving an era of composition that I have always found very elegant.

You can find it HERE.