Selasih

Since 2019

Selasih began in 2019 with a sack of benzoin tears from North Sumatra and no plan for them. The resin is tapped from trees in the hills above Lake Toba and sold by weight to incense makers. Very little of it reaches a perfume bottle with its origin still attached.

Each perfume here starts from one such material and is built outward from it: kaffir lime peel, ylang-ylang, jasmine, benzoin, clove, vetiver. The house buys from growers it has visited and prints the district on the box.

Everything is compounded, macerated and bottled in Bandung in batches of a few hundred.

What it makes

• KemenyanBenzoin, a resin tapped from Styrax trees in North Sumatra
• Jeruk PurutKaffir lime, a knobbled citrus grown in gardens across Java and Sumatra
• KenangaCananga, the Javanese form of the ylang-ylang tree, distilled from its flowers
• MelatiJasminum sambac, the small jasmine of Javanese weddings and of jasmine tea
• CengkihClove, the dried flower bud of a tree from the islands of Maluku
• Akar WangiVetiver, a grass whose roots are distilled in the hills around Garut, West Java

By hand