The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
April Lies dropped from Melt Season's catalog in 2024, a fragrance composed by perfumer Steve Guo and part of the house's Classic Season collection. The name reads as a small contradiction in both English and Chinese. April suggests renewal. Lies suggests something withheld. Together they hint at a season that hasn't quite committed to itself: too early for fruit, too late for frost, somewhere in the in-between. Melt Season built its identity around that kind of duality, working with fragrances that hold opposing ideas in the same bottle without resolving them too quickly. Steve Guo's composition for April Lies stays inside that frame. It opens cold, dries down warm, and never quite settles on a single mood.
What's interesting about April Lies is how naked the structure is. Poplar buds, lemon, dew on top. Jasmine, orchid, rose in the middle. Musk, ambrette, cedarwood, white willow underneath. No smoke, no spice bomb, no dark resin to anchor the base. Steve Guo keeps it close to the body instead, letting ambrette do the heavy lifting as a skin-like musk that doesn't lean on the gourmand sweetness vanilla-heavy compositions tend to carry.
The evolution
The first ten minutes smell like green citrus and cold air. Lemon cuts through, sharp and bright, while the poplar bud brings a green resin note that feels young and sappy, closer to early spring growth than anything deeply aromatic. The dew accord rounds it out, soft and slightly mineral, lending the opening a clean, almost pre-dawn quality. There's nothing sweet here yet. Nothing warm. Nothing that says perfume in any traditional sense. By thirty minutes the jasmine and orchid have wandered in, but they don't shout. They float. The white floral quality is diaphanous, more suggestion than statement, and the rose keeps it from going soapy by introducing a gentle, slightly honeyed warmth. This is the phase where most people will smell your wrist and ask what it is. Then the base takes over. Ambrette comes through first, a musky seed-skin warmth that softens everything above it.
Cultural impact
April Lies sits inside Melt Season's Classic Season collection, a grouping that includes several other compositions from the house. The collection brings together fragrances that share a certain clarity of structure, each one built around a distinct mood or seasonal reference point. April Lies occupies a particular place within that framework because its palette stays relatively universal. The fragrance relies on poplar bud, lemon, dew, jasmine, orchid, rose, musk, ambrette, cedarwood, and white willow, a set of materials that read clearly across different cultural scent vocabularies without requiring specialized knowledge to appreciate.
