The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Elise Walraven dropped She's a Kiwi Hunny in 2020. The name reads like a joke, a wink at the country's national bird wrapped around a jar of something golden. But Elise isn't making novelty scents. She's making postcards. This one is addressed to the Kiwi fruit itself, that small fuzzy thing that took root in New Zealand and became something of a national symbol. Pairing it with honey feels less like a pun and more like a love letter to the land it grew from. The flax grounds it in place, holding the sweetness somewhere earthbound, somewhere grassy and alive. Oakmoss and tobacco give it the shadow side, the part of any beautiful landscape that isn't postcard-perfect. There's something deliberate in how Elise handles the composition.
What makes this composition interesting is the Kiwi note itself. It doesn't smell like the fruit's green flesh or its tangy tropical sweetness. In perfumery, kiwi often reads as a bright, slightly sharp fruity-vegetal accord, closer to fresh-cut stems than to candy. Elise leans into that greener, more vegetal reading here, letting the fruit provide structure rather than obvious sweetness. The honey steps in to fill the warmth gap. It's rich and golden in the blend, a slow pour of sweetness that lifts the sharper top notes without flattening them.
The evolution
The first hour is a grin. Kiwi snaps open, sharp and almost effervescent, with honey already pooling underneath like warm syrup catching light. It's bright, almost playful. The flax adds a dry, papery texture, like sun-bleached linen. Around the two-hour mark the mood shifts. The oakmoss arrives without announcement, dragging the honey down from its sunny perch into something deeper, damper, greener. The tobacco surfaces next, not as smoke but as cured leaf, dry and slightly bitter, cutting through the residual sweetness like espresso after dessert. By hour four the fruit is mostly gone. What remains is a close-to-skin blend of moss, tobacco, and the ghost of honey. It doesn't project much in the final hours. It stays in your personal space, warm and a little wild, the kind of scent someone catches only when they're close enough to matter.
Cultural impact
She's a Kiwi Hunny sits in a specific corner of indie perfumery where national identity becomes olfactory art. New Zealand carries its own distinctive scent vocabulary, shaped by flax, by honey traditions, by the green, windswept character of the landscape itself. Elise Walraven works inside that vocabulary, drawing on Kiwi iconography in a way that feels rooted rather than imported. The result is a fragrance that feels geographically specific in a way most commercial perfumery doesn't, speaking in a dialect that owes little to European or Middle Eastern canon.
