The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Christèle Jacquemin spent a month in an artist's residence in Taipei. The city pressed in, all volume and hustle, the constant buzzy noise of a metropolis that never quite exhales. She found relief in the nights. In walks through nature, away from the city's insistence. Meandering Soul is what that return to calm smells like. Not an escape, exactly. A meandering back, under trees, along paths, into the shadows where everything holds its breath for a moment. The name itself captures something essential: a wandering, unhurried quality that mirrors the experience of walking alone at dusk. The fragrance mirrors that journey, the way a quiet path through a forest can feel both familiar and mysterious.
What makes Meandering Soul unusual is the fennel. It's listed in sources as Spanish fennel, and it does something unexpected here, it opens the composition with a cool, faintly anise-green note that feels more like an herb from a kitchen garden than a perfumery ingredient. Paired with hinoki wood, a Japanese cedar prized for its quiet, almost meditative quality, the top sets up a tension between the herbal and the woody that the rest of the pyramid has to resolve. The heart does that resolving. French narcissus, waxy, indolic, deeply floral, alongside Madagascan ylang-ylang, creamy and tropical. Cinnamon adds warmth, a soft spice that bridges the cool opening and the gourmand base.
The evolution
Hinoki and Spanish fennel arrive together, the hinoki cool and meditative, the fennel green with a faint anise whisper that some people read as almost curry-like. It lasts fifteen, twenty minutes before the heart begins to warm through. French narcissus and ylang-ylang take over. The narcissus is waxy, a little animalic underneath the floral, it gives the heart a body that the top lacked. Ylang-ylang makes it creamy, tropical. Cinnamon threads through, adding a soft spice that keeps the heart from reading as purely floral. The base unfolds gradually, revealing tobacco and caramel that settle low, close to the skin. The caramel is sweet but not confectionary, more like the edge of something burnt, the smell of sugar meeting heat. The tobacco is warm, dry, not green.
Cultural impact
Meandering Soul sits in a quiet corner of niche perfumery. Wearers describe it as the scent of someone who walks into a room and doesn't need to announce themselves. The fennel in the opening is unusual enough to polarize, some find it medicinal, others find it transporting. That divide is part of what makes it worth discovering. The fragrance moves through its notes with a deliberate pacing, starting green and slightly sharp, softening into florals that feel both intimate and expansive, and arriving at a base that whispers rather than shouts.
