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Hello friends! This is Nadia 🙂 Who else has had a pep in their step since Tuesday night? I can’t be the only one. Today’s newsletter will cover: upcoming events, a coupon code for my favorite Jasmine body oil, & Zohran Mamdani’s historic win.
“Perfume you can eat.” That’s how Zohran Mamdani described Rajnigandha Silver Pearls in a viral video recently. These silver pearls are saffron-blended cardamom seeds you’ll find in every South Asian auntie’s purse,meant to freshen your breath after a meal.
It’s funny, but also true: our scent culture has always lived at the intersection of ritual and flavor. Those tiny silver pearls your parents kept in the car or passed around after dinner are really fragments of olfactory history: jasmine, cardamom, and memory disguised as mouth freshener. Seeing him unapologetically share something that personal, that specific, in public felt strange… almost disorienting. It took me back to showing up at school with henna after Eid and realizing, suddenly, that something ordinary to me looked foreign to everyone else.
When Mamdani won this week, my heart felt full in a way it hasn’t for a long time. I’ve always tried to steer clear of “identity politics,” even in fragrance; I like what I like. Just because someone looks like me doesn’t mean they get an automatic stamp of approval on my taste. That’s the only way to stay fair.
Growing up Indian and Muslim even before 9/11, I spent years trying to disappear parts of myself — the names, the smells, the language, the rituals. It took adulthood to realize those were my roots, my own fragrance history. I kept thinking about how South Asian fragrance has always been political, how our jasmine, attars, and oils were once dismissed as “too much,” or “too foreign.” The same notes that shaped centuries of perfumery were written off as excess when they came from us.
So this week, I’ve been reaching for the Soma Ayurvedic Jasmine Body Oil again. I’ve already shared my love for this Madurai jasmine oil here and here — it’s a scent that reminds me of the beauty we come from. Radiant, grounded, familiar, and proud.
The scent itself opens soft, like jasmine at golden hour. Not indolic, but lifted by spearmint, vetiver, and pomegranate oils. It melts into the skin, leaving behind a creamy, warm floral trail that feels intimate and luminous. Perfect after a shower on damp skin, or layered under your favorite solar fragrance. I love wearing it to bed. Romantic, yes but also powerful.
In a fragrance landscape still obsessed with Eurocentric ideals, this jasmine body oil feels quietly subversive. Oils once dismissed as old-fashioned or “ethnic” are finding their way back to the center of modern perfumery, and that feels extra poetic this week. Like the world is finally catching up to what we’ve known all along.
The story behind it is just as intoxicating. Soma’s founder, Arjun, calls this the hero product that started it all. It’s made from jasmine buds grown in Madurai, a small town in South India often called The Jasmine City. The bloom is treated like an art form there — the soil, the heat, the air, everything perfectly tuned to produce the most fragrant jasmine on earth. It’s so potent that it perfumes the air at night.
Soma takes that heritage and distills it into something unmistakably modern. An object of ritual and refinement. It’s a return to ritual, to softness, to self.
This is where modern perfumery is headed: formulations that live between skincare and scent, designed for embodiment rather than excess. It’s what happens when craftsmanship replaces hype, when the artistry of the ingredient takes center stage. The niche future I want to smell.
I’ve been able to snag a special discount for our community. Let me know if you try it and use code PERFUMEVERSE for 20% off. <3
Perfume as architecture, light, and landscape: really loving these perfume flacons. The collaboration between Lalique and artist James Turrell started with these two flacons — Range Rider and Purple Sage. Turrell wanted to bottle the spirit of the American West: air that hums with light, the scent of worn leather, and the quiet mythology of Arizona.
Thank you for this -- such a great read. It's so fascinating that when we taste we also smell, and that so much of what we taste is due to smell! Perfume can be political - just like the spice trade, Western perfume brands can take/borrow a lot from the East - sometimes never acknowledging where ingredients were sourced / lands that were foraged. It's always so refreshing to see brands and scented products that market themselves differently!
Thank you for this -- such a great read. It's so fascinating that when we taste we also smell, and that so much of what we taste is due to smell! Perfume can be political - just like the spice trade, Western perfume brands can take/borrow a lot from the East - sometimes never acknowledging where ingredients were sourced / lands that were foraged. It's always so refreshing to see brands and scented products that market themselves differently!
Love this!!