The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
CHI is Mallo's 2025 entry, a limited-edition parfum born from a collaboration with Japanese tattoo artist GAKKIN. The work sits at the intersection of body art and natural perfumery, translating dense visual imagery into something that moves on skin. Antonio Lasheras and perfumer Rajesh Balkrishnan shaped the composition through direct collaboration with the artist, building around materials drawn from GAKKIN's world: incense smoke, resin, the warmth of skin, the density of pigment. The name CHI draws on the language of Japanese tattoo culture, where the word references skin itself (per reviewers), making the fragrance a kind of wearable surface. GAKKIN's visual style runs toward dense, controlled imagery, and the fragrance carries that same gravitational pull inward.
What makes the composition unusual is how much it refuses to separate incense from body. Peru balsam absolute and Somali frankincense do the structural work, but they're rendered alongside ginger CO2, turmeric, beetroot, and a skin accord that keeps everything human-scaled. The elemi and angelica root cut through the density before Papua oud settles underneath, wild and unpolished. There's no citrus brightness. No clean opening. The materials arrive already in conversation with each other, the way a GAKKIN tattoo reads as complete from the first stroke rather than building toward a climax.
The evolution
The opening is a conversation between smoke and spice. Ginger CO2 lands sharp, almost medicinal, with turmeric's earthy dryness close behind. The elemi brightens just enough to keep things from going dark. There's no bergamot lift, no cold citrus, so the opening reads warm from the first inhalation. Within minutes, the resins begin to move forward. Peru balsam and Somali frankincense take over, and the composition starts to feel less like smoke and more like wood. The beetroot does something strange and specific: it lends a vegetal sweetness, almost root-like, that grounds the spice. The angelica root amplifies this, adding a green bitterness at the edges. The skin accord arrives and everything softens. The Papua oud underneath stops being a separate material and becomes part of the wearer's warmth, blending into the resins until you can't tell where the oud ends and the skin begins.
Cultural impact
CHI sits at an unusual intersection: a Japanese tattoo artist, a Spanish perfume maker, and a perfumer collaborating on a single limited-edition composition. That kind of cross-disciplinary work is still rare in independent naturals, where collaborations tend to stay within the fragrance world. CHI pulls tattoo culture into the frame, treating skin as both canvas and wearer. The materials themselves do much of the work: incense resins, ginger CO2, turmeric, beetroot, a Papua oud that's wild rather than polished. There's no citrus opening, no clean lift, just density from the first moment. That density is the point.
