The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
By-and-By is Folkwinds' 2024 portrait of a summer night described in sources as a train compartment in Cuba: the slow turn of a dark sky through a window, the hum of travel, and the kind of stillness that settles when the scenery stops mattering. Perfumer Jono Bornstein built the composition around Brazilian Amburana wood, a material the house extracted in a novel, bespoke process to coax out its creamy, spiced, almost liqueur-like facets. The Amburana carries a warm, resinous sweetness that reads like a spirit left to breathe, and Bornstein's approach teases out a softness that typical woody notes rarely achieve. You smell it and think of oak barrels, of something aged and patient, of a material treated with enough care to give up its quieter side.
What makes By-and-By unusual is the dual-oud structure paired with a rum-and-coconut opening. Two oud origins, Chinese and Malayan, sit beneath a creamy tropical head, and that tension is the whole point. Amburana wood does the heavy lifting in the heart: it's a Brazilian species known for its warm, resinous, almost-spiced character, and Bornstein's bespoke extraction pulls a creaminess out of it that gives the composition its central pulse. Then there's the castoreum in the base, a fur-and-leather animalic that here leans in rather than holding back.
The evolution
The first thirty minutes belong to the rum. It arrives sweet, almost confectionery, with the pineapple and roasted coconut reading as a single boozy-fruity accord rather than separate notes. The opening carries no sharp citrus to cut it, just warmth from the first spritz onward. By the one-hour mark the vanilla and Amburana wood start folding into each other, and the frangipani surfaces briefly, a tropical floral that feels deliberate, almost cinematic, before the oud steps forward. The white ambergris softens everything, giving the heart a creamy, slightly saline haze that smooths the edges of every note around it.
Cultural impact
By-and-By reads as a deliberate composition rather than a referential one, and wearers tend to describe it less by its notes than by its mood: a porch after midnight, a drink that's been sitting out too long, the kind of slow evening where nobody's checking the clock. The fragrance uses animalic musks and dual-oud structures with a confidence that doesn't lean on any obvious predecessor. Brazilian Amburana wood carries the composition while ouds and musks hold the perimeter, giving the scent a clear protagonist and a clear supporting cast.
