The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Anh Ngo grew up surrounded by Vietnamese tea traditions and jasmine gardens, a sensory foundation that informs her approach to fragrance. When d'Annam's Chapter 2: Memories of Japan requested a scent that embodied the Japanese tea ceremony, the brief was specific: translate a ritual into something you want to live inside, not merely observe. Ngo's response wasn't a literal interpretation. Instead, she drew on her own cultural memory, combining green tea's bright, aromatic clarity with the creamy comfort of Vietnamese milk tea, layering vanilla's warmth to create softness, and adding cone waffle's warm, nostalgic bakery note to ground the composition in something tangible. The result captures ritual without becoming precious.
The philosophy here is restraint. Each note earns its place: green tea provides the visual and aromatic anchor, milk and vanilla offer comfort and depth, and cone waffle adds a tactile, nostalgic warmth that grounds the composition. This isn't about layering complexity for the sake of it. It's about clarity and intention, about creating a scent that feels both specific and universal. Matcha Soft Serve works as a personal signature or a scent to share with someone who needs comfort. The four notes combine to suggest both the ceremony of Japanese tea culture and the simple pleasure of a soft serve cone, translating memory into something wearable.
The evolution
The scent journey of Matcha Soft Serve doesn't follow a traditional arc. Green tea, milk, vanilla, and cone waffle arrive together, a simultaneous opening that refuses to separate itself into neat phases. Green tea leads with its fresh, vegetal character while milk provides immediate softness. Vanilla and cone waffle weave in, their sweet and warm qualities complementing the green tea's brightness. Over the first three hours, these four notes evolve in balance: the green tea's sharpness softens as it merges with milk's creaminess, vanilla deepens, and cone waffle's warmth becomes more pronounced as the composition settles into the skin. By the fourth hour, the scent has reached its most intimate state, projecting at close range while maintaining its dessert-like comfort, fading eventually to a clean, creamy skin trace.
Cultural impact
Matcha Soft Serve received an Honorable Mention in the Independent category at the 2025 Art and Olfaction Awards, a signal that the fragrance community is paying attention to what d'Annam is building. Wearers with firsthand experience of Japanese tea farms describe the matcha as photorealistic, noting that the bitter, nutty quality of real shaded matcha is present in a way that most matcha fragrances miss entirely. The community splits on the jasmine-like floral quality that emerges on some skin, some find it a beautiful surprise, others find it unexpected. But the core appeal is consistent: this is the scent of softness, comfort, and a specific kind of afternoon warmth that people return to again and again.
