The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Death & Other Joys was launched alongside Thus with a Kiss from Samar, the L.A.-based studio of Na-Moya Lawrence and Debbie Lin. Where companion piece Thus with a Kiss turns toward intimacy, Death & Other Joys reaches for weather. Lawrence and Lin built this composition as a small atmospheric scene, and this one is the storm breaking. The name holds the contradiction at its center: endings and pleasures sitting in the same room, neither canceling the other. Quenepa, a tropical fruit with a curious citrus-green tang, anchors the opening. Barnyard, butter, biscuit, an electro-static accord, and Spanish lime build a landscape that smells like the back porch after a long electrical storm, when the air tastes metallic and something sweet is still baking.
The composition's most unusual move is the electro-static accord. A note that smells like static electricity is almost contrarian against most mainstream fragrance. It evokes the moment before a storm when hair lifts, when skin prickles, when the air itself seems charged. Paired with barnyard, that accord refuses the clean-room approach. Barnyard in this context means real farm, animal warmth, damp straw and mud and the musky comfort of creatures in close quarters. The butter and biscuit notes soften the edges without sanding them down.
The evolution
On skin, Death & Other Joys opens with the static crackle front and center. The first ten minutes smell less like perfume and more like atmosphere, ozone and warm dust, with a fleeting green brightness from quenepa threading through. Then the butter arrives, warm and immediate, and the biscuit note follows close behind, giving the opening a kitchen-counter weight. By the thirty-minute mark, the Spanish lime has settled into the composition like a tropical fruit left on a windowsill: present but no longer sharp. The barnyard takes longer to surface. It does not arrive as a separate phase so much as creep into everything else, lending a warm, animalic undertone that makes the butter smell richer and the static smell earthier. After two hours, the composition reads as a single blended atmosphere rather than identifiable notes.
Cultural impact
Death & Other Joys arrived in 2025 as part of Samar's expanding catalog of weather-and-mood themed oil compositions, a small studio run by perfumers Na-Moya Lawrence and Debbie Lin. The choice of quenepa, a tropical fruit most English speakers have never encountered, signals the brand's curiosity about texture. Quenepa opens with a strange citrus-green tang that feels more like discovering a new fruit at a roadside stand than recognizing a familiar perfume note. Barnyard and the electro-static accord push further into unfamiliar territory, refusing the easy categories that most commercial fragrance defaults to.
