L’Officiel Philippines talks to five brands that infuse local ingredients and cultural memory into fragrances for the islands.

What does it mean to design fragrance for the tropics? Scent is universal, but it’s also deeply cultural. Heat and humidity change how fragrance behaves: the way it lasts, blooms, or interacts with skin. It lives in memory too, in the baby cologne after a bath, the smoke of church incense, the White Flower kept in a lola’s bag.
The Philippines has long had its own relationship with scent. Fragrant sampaguita garlands are used for ceremony and adornment, often sold outside churches. Grown in gardens countrywide, calamansi is used just as much to cut through odor as it is for cooking.
Ylang-ylang, the plant known as the Queen of Perfumes, grows natively in the islands. In the late 1800s, the country held a near monopoly on its production, exporting it to European fragrance houses before trade was disrupted by World War I. Today, a new generation of perfumers is returning to this scented landscape, distilling the ingredients, memories, and rituals of the islands into a distinctly Filipino sense of place.

<h3 style="text-align: center;">Home Studio Scents</h3>

Scroll through perfume reviews on TikTok and Instagram, and Home Studio Scents would probably show up. Sleuth long enough on Reddit’s r/fragheadph thread, a Redditor or two has likely recommended their perfumes too.
That following didn’t happen overnight. It started from what Filipino consumers couldn’t find.
“Before the pandemic, we only had a very few brands offering home and personal scents [in the Philippines],” shares Iris Garcia of Home Studio Scents. This gap in the market presented an exciting opportunity. Initially launched selling scented candles in 2020, the brand has evolved steadily throughout the years, expanding its product line-up to include perfumes, diffusers, and room sprays.
“We do have a lot of local perfumers here in the Philippines, but the market is largely filled with fragrances inspired by or created as dupes of high-end perfumes,” she explains. “Our goal is to offer Filipino consumers something distinctive, thoughtfully crafted and unlike anything else in the market, but still making it affordable for our customers.”
Creating scents for the Philippine market, of course, means addressing the tropical climate. Heat and humidity affect how a fragrance performs and stays on skin, especially during the summer. So, they formulate their products to work well in various weather conditions. They also prioritize quality and safety, mixing phthalate-free oils from the United States with local perfume-grade alcohol.
From that foundation, the creative process changes depending on what the scent is made for. “For a home scent, you want to offer something relaxing, inviting, and grounding. Scents that create a sense of comfort and make a space feel like home,” shares Iris. “While for the body scents, you can offer a much wider range of scents to explore. You can be more expressive and playful, allowing people to choose a fragrance that reflects their mood, personality, or individual style.”
Although they’ve grown, Home Studio Scents has kept the brand unapologetically unintimidating. When it comes to naming their bottles, they use friendly, evocative titles like Mermaid Skin, The Croissant Club, or Concrete Jungle. They’re readily accessible with affordable price points, selling on popular e-commerce platforms like Lazada and Shopee. “We’re also looking forward to bringing our brand into more thoughtfully creative spaces like pop-ups, bridal fairs and fragrance gatherings,” shares Iris.

When Mark Zavalla left his tech job eight years ago, he decided to travel. “I said I would just take trips however far along my savings can fund,” the self-taught perfumer shares. These travels would later become an inspiration for Saan Saan, a home fragrance brand.
“I anchor all of our creations in building a sense of place,” he explains. “It’s about really taking you there—taking you to the mountains, the water, the river, or the city.”
This results in fragrances that try to capture the temples in Kyoto, the mountains in Sagada, and the beaches in Luzon. “I let myself soak in a feeling or memory…and try to get into that mood. Then, you come to your desk and start looking for that feeling by smelling,” he says of his process. “It’s like matching the notes in your mind and in your heart with the notes of the scents.”
Oftentimes, it’s hyperspecific, capturing a fleeting moment over a geographic coordinate. A scent called Baker Street of Poblacion, for example, is inspired by a trip to Bohol. While visiting a sleepy, Spanish-style town in between Tagbilaran and Loboc, he followed his nose to a street that smelled of pandesal, which he found filled with bakeries. Mark held on to that memory of that warm, cozy afternoon and used it to create the scent.
At Saan Saan, fragrance is also a medium in a broader creative dialogue. “My first love is the creative side of things,” the perfumer explains. “I’ve always wanted to write and to photograph, so I wanted to marry all of these things and come up with something I could really say is close to my heart.” The brand often intersects with other forms of local art, from collaborating with ceramists to creating a scented screening for the movie Gitling. It shows that smell can be viewed as an art form, and it can be as narrative-driven as a novel or painting.

<h3 style="text-align: center;">Guava Smells</h3>

It began in a living room on Guava Street, where couple Noelle Lejano and Ryan Danao conceptualized their fragrance brand. The name, Guava Smells, is a literal nod to Ryan’s address. “It was a joke at first,” he says. “And then we got attached to the name.” The minimalist logo printed across their bottles is a doodle of his nose. “Kasi he’s tangos,” jokes Noelle, who created the brand’s visual identity.
Noelle’s mother would regularly mix her own perfumes and gift them to Ryan, not accepting any payment for it, and that’s when he got the idea that this could be a sellable product. At its inception, it seemed entirely playful, but it translated into a serious exercise in attainable luxury: unisex perfumes sold below a thousand pesos.
Throughout high school, Ryan remembers meticulously rationing a bottle of Ralph Lauren cologne. “He would spray only once because it was expensive,” laughingly shares Noelle. “After traveling to Korea and Japan and seeing the fragrance landscape they had, we wanted to provide that kind of variety in scent and premium experience at a price point that is quite friendly here.” This gap between what they experienced overseas and what was available at home got them to start formulating.
“It’s just like how chefs do it,” Ryan says of their research and development process. They begin at the drawing board, deciding what scent profile the brand needs, sourcing the raw materials from their suppliers, and then bringing it back to their studio. “That’s where the creative aspect begins. We start ideating on what would work well with the notes we have,” he adds. The result is a line-up of sophisticated scent profiles: violet with freesia, vanilla with smoked oud, lily of the valley with white musk.
Today, Guava Smells has developed a dedicated following who no longer need to ration their favorite perfumes. “It’s been overwhelming,” Noelle says proudly. “We’ve had to close shop a few times cause we could not handle the demand.”

<h3 style="text-align: center;">Wren Atelier</h3>

Why would a brand create a fine fragrance that smells like a sour tamarind soup? For Renato Lopena Jr., founder of Wren Atelier, his Sinigang perfume shouldn’t be taken literally. Instead, it should evoke the feeling of eating and preparing the soup during the rainy season. “I always wanted to create a tamarind fragrance and also a rain fragrance,” explains the Grasse-trained perfumer. “And I thought sinigang was the perfect way to make it Filipino.”
This distinct and creative approach to fragrance is what defines Wren Atelier. After studying in France in 2015 and spending a few years creating commercial scents, Renato felt a little restricted by project briefs. So, in 2020, he launched his own label. He named it after the wren bird, which is a symbol of creativity and boldness in Celtic folklore.
“My brand is in the category of avant-garde or bold,” shares the founder. “I don’t really care if it’s going to be a super hit, as long as I create a fragrance that tells a story, that gives a different perspective and a point of view. My focus is really more on the artsy side, rather than the traditional way where it has to smell nice and be wearable. I don’t care whether it’s wearable or not.”
True to his word, the brand’s offerings don’t read like the traditional fragrance line-up. Smoky Gourmand, for example, is not like the usual sweet perfumes. Instead, it draws its sweetness from tupig, a Filipino sticky rice dessert that Renato grew up watching his mother and sister prepare. “I wanted to evoke that feeling of comfort, of memory in a fragrance. But not make it very gourmand, because that is not my style,” he shares. “Tupig is the best way to do it because it has that toasted or grilled facet that veers away from the traditional gourmand.”
Now gearing up to make his brand more accessible internationally, Wren Atelier is positioned to introduce its fragrances to a wider audience. “Finally, they can see a different voice, a different point of view, rather than just being the traditional Western, Middle Eastern,” explains Renato. “They will have access to Southeast Asian perfumery and cultural references.”

<h3 style="text-align: center;">Oscar Mejia Artisan Fragrances</h3>

On an orchid farm in Davao, five-year-old Oscar Mejia III began experimenting with floral scents. “Growing up, I would be surrounded by all these flowers,” he recalls. “I would pick them and boil them as if making my own perfumes.” At the start, it was simply a form of child’s play, but this would later transform into a lifelong passion.
His foundations began in the hard sciences—attending Philippine Science High School, the country’s premier science institution, before studying Chemistry, Materials Science, and Engineering at Ateneo de Manila University. But the draw of his childhood experiments always remained. After graduating, he decided to become a perfumer. Oscar taught himself through books and resources, then received formal training in Paris and Grasse, France—the world’s perfume capital. There, under the mentorship of Nicolas de Barry, a French perfumer and historian, he further developed his craft.
What started as bespoke gifts to friends eventually became a formal enterprise, prompting Oscar to take a leap and introduce his fragrances to the market in 2007. “The brand is really anchored on telling stories using fragrances,” he shares. “Whatever I make is a reflection of either my personal past or the heritage of the Philippines. It’s always very intimate, and very personal in the way it is expressed, whether through the fragrance, through how we sell it, through the packaging.”
A memory of his childhood garden’s Tanhua flower inspired a perfume called Manatili, which translates to “to remain.” Curiously, the large white flower only blooms at night before wilting at dawn. “The flower is no longer there, but I wanted to capture that experience and bottle it into a scent,” he reminisces. “So I created that Tanhua flower from memory, rebuilding as much as I can remember in terms of the scent.” The sense of smell, after all, is processed in the same part of the brain as memories and emotions.
Essentially, Oscar sees scent as a medium to preserve Philippine narratives. His approach to storytelling bleeds not only into how he designs the fragrances but also into his retail strategy, leaning towards culturally relevant stockists like the Ayala Museum instead of department stores. He also collaborates on spatial scents with hospitality brands like Araw Hospitality, Amanpulo, and Dusit Thani.

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