Nordic Cedar by Maya Njie

This perfume is at once a beautiful, festive hint of enjoying Kanelbullar in front of a burning fire and a chilly breeze from a forest wafting from the top notes in the bright opening. Contrary to the bottle, I feel like it’s the opposite of the minimalist Scandy trend (see my Bryedo mention earlier) because of a deep history woven through the aroma it’s filled with. It’s one of those scents that’s like opening up a photo album and maniacally sniffing the pages, while also having a cup of cardamom and cinnamon sticks steeped in hot water next to you.

The perfumer, Maya Nije, wanted to reconstruct moments in her family’s history through the range of her line. Each scent is accompanied with a physical snapshot in her past with color ways extracted from them. When you smell the scent after viewing the colors it puts you in the mindset to see what points of the notes shine through as the tones provided.

Nordic Cedar does have several wintery evergreen moments, but at it’s foundation the warmer tones make it feel like you’re coming in from a day out in the cold. Oftentimes perfumes are marketed through the generic stories they can tell—but when you invest in a niche house like this you really carry the maker and their work with you as you wear. I wear this and I reflect on Maya’s history and blend it with happy memories in Stockholm right before Christmastime a couple years ago. The scent actually brought me back to discovering and falling in love with a new country while sipping Glogg with a friend of mine. It was love at first sniff for me.

Notes include cardamom, patchouli, musk, cedarwood, and amber. In real life you will smell like the Christmas Market in Gamla Stan, but don’t let that guide you—this is a versatile scent that can be worn anytime.