The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
No. 64 Ume comes from Floriography, a Hong Kong house that builds each numbered composition around a single sensory moment rather than a traditional olfactory family. The brief for Ume centers on a winter ramble through snow-dusted branches, catching the tart edge of plum fruit and the green bite of shiso leaves. Perfumer Jo Shaw treats the conceptual anchor of each numbered release as the starting point for the formula. The 2024 release sits within the brand's Flow Collection, a group of compositions keyed to elemental or seasonal impressions. The title itself plays with the Chinese name for plum, ume, a fruit that carries distinct cultural weight across East Asia and that shows up often in preserves, liqueurs, and tea blends.
What's unusual here is the placement of Snow as a listed heart note, listed openly alongside pine as a deliberate material statement rather than buried into the composition. The shiso does heavy lifting too, since the leaf carries a grassy, almost minty character that gives the plum something to push against. The pine needles carry a crisp, slightly resinous cool that lifts the fruit out of any single-note territory. Together the three heart ingredients work as a small chamber group, each one balancing the others, with the ume at center stage.
The evolution
The first ten minutes are the loudest. Shiso dominates, green and almost herbal-medicinal, the way the leaf smells when you tear it between your fingers in a garden. Ume arrives within the opening minute, tart and fleshy, less sweet than you'd expect, more like salted plum skin than jam. Pine and the listed Snow note settle in around the twenty-minute mark, cooling the composition and adding a resinous, coniferous quiet. The base takes over by hour three or four: frankincense smoke, cedar wood, a balsamic sweetness that has nothing sugary about it. The cedar reads dry and pencil-shaving, the frankincense offers a thin trail of resinous smoke that never turns heavy or churchlike. As the hours pass, the woods settle into each other and form a single warm skeleton under the cooler top notes.
Cultural impact
No. 64 Ume sits within a recognizable lane of niche compositions that pull from East Asian culinary and botanical traditions, ingredients like pickled plum, shiso, and yuzu treated as serious perfumery material. The fragrance earns attention by leaning into its green and tart character rather than rounding it off into something safer. The shiso opening gives the composition a strong first impression, distinctive enough that wearers immediately know what they're working with. Rather than projecting broadly, the scent moves close to the skin, an intimate register that suits its winter-comfort character.
