Two niche perfume brands—one rooted in Myanmar's heritage, the other in Thailand's bold pantry—are quietly redefining what a gourmand fragrance can be. Gabar, a London-based house founded by Susan Wai Hnin and Phway Su Aye, translates specific memories of Southeast Asia into scent, while Thai perfumer Prin Lomros builds his brand Prin around unconventional local ingredients like durian and grilled rice. Together they illustrate a broader shift: Asian perfumery is moving gourmand beyond vanilla, caramel, and chocolate into a vocabulary of its own.
The Rise of Nouveau Gourmand in Asian Perfumery
The category's transformation is well underway across the region. As Antoaneta Becker reports for BeautyMatter, a new generation of Asian fragrance houses is drawing on roasted sweet potato, rice milk, matcha, and pandan to move gourmand beyond the accords that long defined it. The stakes are commercial as much as creative: local brands are building cultural differentiation that international houses cannot easily manufacture, and local olfactory codes are gaining global appeal.
Maxime Exler, fine fragrance perfumer at the French house Mane, frames the shift in terms of range. "Asian cuisines offer a broader and more nuanced palette for gourmand perfumery than the traditional idea of gourmand as being primarily sweet," he told BeautyMatter. "The ingredients themselves are important, but so are the textures, contrasts, and sensations associated with them." Sarah Pae, a "perfume tailor" at the South Korean creative group Scent By, gives the direction a name: "nouveau gourmand."
Consumer interest is measurable. According to China's Xiaohongshu 2025 Perfume & Fragrance Industry Trend Inspiration Report, searches for gourmand fragrances grew 46% year-over-year in 2024, while the platform's broader food-inspired scent category recorded a 78% increase in searches and a 108% increase in content views between March 2024 and March 2025. Chestnut and biscuit scents alone saw searches rise 214%, with content views up 247%.
