The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Maruyama takes its name from a place in Sapporo, Hokkaido, a garden visited during a summer trip where the air carried the scent of herbs and flowers growing together in controlled abundance. Prissana, founded in Genoa in 2018, built this fragrance around that memory: a single afternoon, a specific garden, a moment of botanical clarity captured in camphor and chamomile. The Italian house approaches scent as storytelling, and here the story is a Japanese garden rendered through an Italian hand, precise, restrained, and deeply herbal.
The composition centers on a tension unusual in modern perfumery: the medicinal sharpness of camphor against the honeyed softness of chamomile. These two notes rarely share top billing, one reads clinical, the other comforting, yet here they balance. Angelica and lovage root add bitter-green depth beneath the camphor, while rose otto and ambrette seed introduce a faint sweetness that prevents the herbal character from becoming austere. The result is a fragrance that smells like dried botanicals, not fresh-cut stems, the difference matters.
The evolution
The opening hits immediately: camphor dominates, medicinal and cold, with angelica and lovage root lending a bitter-green undertone. This phase lasts roughly 20 minutes before the chamomile begins to soften the edges, introducing a honeyed warmth that tempers the sharpness. By the second hour, marjoram and artemisia have joined, creating a dry herbal heart that reads more like potpourri than perfume. Cedar and vetiver arrive last, settling into skin as a quiet woody base. On most skin types, the fragrance holds for 8-10 hours, projecting moderately for the first three hours before becoming intimate and close. The drydown on fabric, cedar and faint incense, can linger into the next day.
Cultural impact
Maruyama occupies an unusual space in the niche fragrance landscape: a Japanese botanical memory rendered through an Italian hand. The camphor-chamomile pairing is neither safe nor immediately approachable, which attracts collectors seeking something outside the mainstream floral-fruity territory. Within Prissana's catalog, it stands apart from mythological references and folklore-inspired compositions, offering instead a moment of geographic specificity, a garden, a summer afternoon, a scent that translates place into feeling.
