The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Leslie Smith of Siren Song Elixirs released Pandan Perfume in 2023 as part of the brand's Bakery & Sweets collection, and the inspiration is as literal as it gets: sticky rice with coconut cream, coconut milk, and brown sugar blended with the pandan plant itself. Smith built the composition around that specific combination: the way pandan smells herbal and almost vanilla-like at once, the creaminess of coconut milk, the slow sweetness of brown sugar warming into the rice. The result is less a dessert-themed fragrance and more a translation of a recipe into scent. The pandan leaf carries the green tint of the composition while the coconut and brown sugar build the edible richness underneath, each note pulling toward the others until the whole thing smells like the bowl it's trying to evoke.
Pandan is an unusual choice for a perfume. It reads green and grassy in its raw form, with a sweetness that recalls vanilla but carries a distinct lemony, almost grassy edge, something closer to lemongrass than to anything in the Western dessert vocabulary. Letting the pandan lead rather than hide it behind more familiar gourmand notes takes some nerve in a market saturated with vanilla and caramel, but Smith commits to it.
The evolution
On skin, the opening hits with the warm, lactonic richness of coconut milk and brown sugar, almost immediately edible. Pandan arrives as something softer than you'd expect, a vanilla-adjacent warmth with an herbal undertone that steers the composition away from simple sweetness. The heart is where ginger and star anise do their quiet work, a clean warmth that keeps the dessert from going sticky. As the hours pass, the coconut settles into a softer, creamier register, the rice note turns quiet and milky, and what remains is a soft vanilla-brown sugar warmth with just enough rose to keep it from becoming one-dimensional. An intimate gourmand drydown lingers on skin and clothing well into the evening, the kind of fragrance that rewards someone leaning in close rather than announcing itself across a room.
Cultural impact
Pandan Perfume occupies a specific niche within the indie fragrance world: the dessert-as-fragrance category, but with an ingredient that most gourmand compositions ignore. Pandan remains rare in Western perfumery, which makes this both a familiar comfort for those who know the ingredient and a discovery for everyone else encountering it for the first time in scent form. The perfume reads like a recipe rendered in olfaction, translating a bowl of coconut rice and pandan into a wearable composition without needing extra narrative scaffolding.
