SEOUL’S SCENT SCENE
*Inside Korea’s Rising Scent Scene
written LAURA DUNKELMANN
New notes. Untold stories. Visionary visuals. The world’s most restless perfume concepts are now rising from Seoul. To reduce them all to K-pop gloss would be a mistake: these young brands play in different registers – some eccentric, some tender, some unapologetically avant-garde. Always authentic. Always alive. A scent compilation of the city’s new vanguard.
On a small hill, tucked between housing blocks and the Leeum Museum, a thick red upside-down “U” pulses with bass – and base notes. Step through and you’re inside Borntostandout’s flagship, part gallery, part funhouse, part provocation. In one corridor: paintings, porcelain, sculpture. In another: mirrored walls, from whose ceilings hang matte-white flacons like ghostly fruit. The mood is loud, the gestures are bold. With creations like Fig Porn and Dirty Rice founder Jun Lim, once an investment banker, insists on friction. “Inspiration comes from the everyday. Sometimes from something as banal as old chewing gum,” he says. The vibe? More bar-night than boutique. Perfume as an attitude, not flattering accessory. It works – even the branded bags have become covetable objects. Founded in 2022, Borntostandout is already backed by L’Oréal and available in niche perfumeries globally.
Borntostandout, Hannam Flagship Store
Borntostandout
Black Guava
A short walk from Borntostandout down the hill, a different frequency: the dreamlike Pesade, with its hazy unisex blend Blue Eyeshadow and the London-inflected SW19, complete with gelato bar serving flavors that echo the scents, are nestled between internationally known names in the era most dense with scent stores. Few metres further, there’s minimalist Nonfiction, whose in-store-only Odorama Cities channels Korean herbs into an olfactory postcard. And then the city’s scent icon: Tamburins.
Its best seller Chamo is everywhere. A code, a secret handshake. Seoul’s answer to what Santal 33 once was in New York: understated but unmistakable, raw yet soft, a cult in the air. To leave Seoul without a Tamburins bag is almost impossible. Hand cream, balm, eau de parfum – they’re souvenirs as much as scents. Founded in 2017, part of the Gentle Monster universe, Tamburins now runs multiple flagships and pop-ups, Haus Nowhere being the latest dependance. But perfume is only half the story: retail is theatre. Abstract electronic art-pop plays, K-pop stars front the campaigns. In summer, Silent Beach filled a warehouse with sand, performance art, and a limited-edition vinyl tied to the scent. Perfume as gesamtkunstwerk.
From a Western gaze, such staging feels almost alien. And yet, despite the radical packaging and spectacle, most Korean brands still collaborate with French perfumers. The labels may read Made in Korea, but the tradition lingers in the base notes.
Tamburins Store Seoul, new space at the recently opened Haus Nowhere
Not so at Sarangheyo. Here, founder Sung composes with Korean collaborators only. His collection is a memoir in molecules – journeys, encounters, stories refracted through a Korean lens. There’s nothing trendy here, the brand is a reflection of class and timlessness. His studio, hidden in a 1960s office block and far away from any shiny shopping area, it feels like an echo chamber of that heritage: oils he uses to experiment with, glass vials, a vintage hi-fi he implemented into the showrooms soundsystem, humming soft jazz. “My perfumes are a link to my origin,” he explains while putting on his iconic canvas apron. Clients can visit the space for intimate consultations as well. After years at LVMH, Sung left and launched Sarangheyo in 2020. “Everything I do now feels authentic,” he says, showing a traditional korean hanko ink pad – the smell of which inspired his next launch. Once conceived as men’s scents, his range now floats unisex: sweet-bitter contrasts in Chocolatic Nchnt; fragile florals in Flower, inspired by a painter living deep in the Seorak forest, where pine and musk drift together like mist.
Saranghaeyo
91. CHOCOLATIC NCHNT
Saranghaeyo
Founder Sung in his showroom
Also, Sisiology, founded by Nicole Park – a third-generation insider of South Korea’s beauty world – turns away from spectacle and toward the analogue. The language of the 2022 found brand is quieter, circling around moments of emotion and connection, like photographs held in scent. The perfumes feel like intimate captures, soft as memory. Nicole herself reflects that sensibility: her store sits inside a futuristic building whose architecture, from afar, resembles the silhouette of a face. Inside, the atmosphere is hushed. When she sprays Overflown onto delicately illustrated blotters, she doesn’t ask which notes I detect, but which emotions surface. With this clean, floral, luminous fragrance, a sense of enthusiasm and comfort rises — less a perfume, more a feeling suspended in air.
In contrast, CGS presents the avant-garde in its purest form. The 2025 perfume debut of avant-garde photographer Gi Seok Cho. The most niche of all – and the most otherworldly. A secret showroom above his studio in Gangnam. Appointment only. “How did you find this place?” asks the man at the door. Inside, you step into a surreal topography: photographic collages, sculpture fragments, brutalist concrete pierced by circular shafts of light. Flacons displayed like trophies from a parallel planet. On the rooftop, a massive white statue – fallen angel, street fighter, both. The perfumes themselves? Softer than the world they inhabit. Bad Dreams, one of the three perfumes, with its smoke of tobacco and cinnamon, is strangely tender against visuals of thorned hands and butterfly-winged heads.
Sisology
Overtlowing
Creativity. Authenticity. Otherness. That is the essence. And while these houses could be imagined in Paris, in London, in Tokyo – it makes absolute sense that they flourish here, now, in Seoul. A young city, in a country actively forging its identity, investing fiercely in its culture.
Through sound. Through scent. Through everything in between.
Sisology
Photoenthusiast and Sisology founder Nicole Park
CGS sculpture at the showrooms rooftop terrace
seen by Cho Gi-Seok
CGS
Love and Hate
