Thank This South Korean Perfumer for Making the Lower East Side Smell Nice

In Beauty Freak, a column for Highsnobiety, Sable Yong explores how the culture of beauty impacts our lives.

“You smell like fresh hotel bedsheets.”

“Are you wearing perfume? You smell so good!”

These are just a few comments I’ve received after hugging friends while rotating through my small collection of NONFICTION fragrances. 

This spring, the Korean fragrance brand opened its first U.S. boutique on the corner of Orchard and Hester Street. The store is, coincidentally, right below “perfume alley,” that five-block radius where there’s seemingly a perfume store between every matcha cafe, elevated pasta joint, and queued-up streetwear clothing shop. But judging by everything I’ve seen (and sniffed) so far, NONFICTION may have what it takes to stick around the neighborhood for a while — and maybe change the way downtown New York smells.

As someone who wants to know what it means to smell cool around the globe, I’d been curious about NONFICTION since their founding in 2019. My experience with fragrances created for or in Asian markets is that they tend to skew toward fresh, sheer, innocuously pleasant, wholly inoffensive profiles — nothing heavy or overly sweet. But that trend is becoming less of a norm, especially now that fragrance as a category has become a global fixation. While I’ve often seen brands borrowing Eastern influences as trends allow (as evidenced by the matcha-, ube-, and boba-themed beauty launches I see all the time on TikTok), I was also curious to see this dynamic flipped: how would a Korean brand create Korean fragrances using a traditional French perfumery palette?

I kept hearing NONFICTION name-dropped as the Korean Le Labo or Diptyque, and while I generally don’t love referring to a brand/person/idea as it compares to its mainstream counterpart, the description did pique my curiosity. Ahead of the official opening, I visited the store to investigate. 

In true LES fashion, the space is minimal and modern. But certain design details hint at historical whimsy: glossy oxblood floors, Queen Anne-style mahogany tables, custom-painted black rose wall tiles in a corner near a handwash station. NONFICTION’s founder, Haeyoung Cha, told me she had the Lower East Side in mind early for the brand’s first U.S. store because the neighborhood mirrors her first shop in Seoul’s Hannam-Dong neighborhood. 

In a way, the store is reflective of the fragrances, which are deceptively simple and generally unfussy, with great attention paid to textural details and the journey of the wear. (They’re not the kinds of fragrances that require much explanation beyond the name.) 

The collection is a tight edit of minimal scent profiles — dewy florals, soft woods, and misty citruses — executed by renowned perfumers such as Dominique Ropion and Maurice Roucel. (Credits include Frederic Malle Portrait Of A Lady, Carnal Flower, Mugler Alien, and Musc Ravageur, Nautica Blue, and DKNY Be Delicious, respectively.) I found that I agreed with the comparison of NONFICTION to Le Labo or other more familiar downtown perfumers. But only in that we’re talking about niche labels with cohesive aesthetics — not because they’re olfactorially similar. 

The simple white labels with black, serifed text look right at home in a shelfie. And the scent names are both ingredient-focused (ie. The Rose) and mood-focused (ie. Gentle Night). The two most recent launches, Dew & Light and Tears In Rain, are a duo of chypres, a modern take on classic French perfumery. (If you’re not a fragrance nerd, a chypre contrasts bright citrusy notes with earthy, woody ones.)  

One unexpected effect of the perfume cultural revolution we’ve been experiencing since mid-pandemic is that there is so much newness in fragrance now, with each hypey brand asserting its own elaborate olfactive expression. Shopping feels much more overwhelming than when the industry relied on a few celebrity-faced campaigns for yet another fashion house’s flanker.

NONFICTION feels refreshingly straightforward in both its branding and scent portfolio. Some people might feel understimulated by its offering, but in my experience, these are the kinds of brands that quietly amass loyal fans — which, as we’ve seen with a certain minimalist lab-inspired perfume brand, works. 

If you’re sick of overthinking aesthetics and perhaps a bit bored of the same Byredo, Le Labo, or Diptyque scents that have reached critical mass (and critical inflation), and if you prefer your personal scent at a pleasantly detectable but nonintrusive volume, I think you’ll have a great time with NONFICTION. If you just want to Smell Nice, they’ve got 17 fine fragrances, a bath and body line, and candles and home fragrance options for you.   

I’ve always been drawn to ylang ylang, but I’ve found that its hint of nectary sweetness can be cloying (having experienced a lot of ylang ylang essential oils that eventually go sour). Tuberose and monoi lend a solar, lactonic creaminess to this scent, and sandalwood and musk balance out the petal-y floral with a sheer, suede-like base. It does smell a wee bit laundry-clean, if you were doing your laundry in Tahiti. 

This scent reminds me of something I loved when I was a teenager in the early aughts: a perfume for a sophisticated woman of the world (or my idea of who that was at the time). To me, it’s one of the more traditional French perfumery scents of the collection. Jasmine, orris, tonka bean, musk, and patchouli create the kind of scent that smells like floral body powder on warm skin. It’s familiar the way an heirloom is but modern in the balanced composition that reads more skin scent than opulent. 

I am a sucker for anything with iris notes. (Iris is also one of the most expensive raw ingredients, but that’s neither here nor there.) It’s the smell of vintage lipstick or powder, of fresh pencil shavings, and of velvety suede — all depending on its composition. Iris Concrete keeps it simple and fairly linear. Ambrette seed, galbanum resinoid, and cedarwood round out the fragrance to bring out iris’s buttery, almost leathery facets. Wearing this feels like wearing that one vintage jacket you’ve had for ages that’s perfectly molded to your body.

Santal may have become the official smell of hotel amenities (and lobbies), which I only take issue with in that it’s a scent that’s come to represent something it probably never intended to. NONFICTION’s take is thankfully one that indulges rather than blands — heavy emphasis on the “cream” in the name. This is such a sunny, lush expression of sandalwood thanks to the cardamom that adds a hint of spice, milky fig, and grassy vetiver. It just feels like a full-fat sandalwood, you know? I hope to see it in hotel bathrooms everywhere. 

This candle is exactly what you’d want your home to smell like if you were hosting an intimate dinner party at a winter cabin. It’s woody, spicy, and warmly enveloping the way a really lush cashmere sweater is after it’s been sitting in the sun. It gives me the feel of having a fireplace without having to worry about floating embers causing a hazard. 

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