Bangkok-born Pissara Umavijani (All photos: Sam Fong/The Edge Malaysia)
Parfums Dusita packs perfume and poetry in a bottle. A whiff will whet your interest to find out more about its chords and notes, the Thai poet who inspired them and his daughter working to keep his legacy alive through scents.
Before Montri Umavijani died in 2006, he asked Pissara to jot down the books he had written. She remembers him saying, “When you work hard, if only one person in the world appreciates your work, you can die happy. Then he started to cry.”
There were more than 20 titles on her list and looking through them, Pissara could imagine her father writing the poems for her. Prof Montri also published his work in Thai and translated books in that language into English, French and German. “After he passed, I promised myself I would bring his poetry to life so people could read them and honour his memory,” she says.
How, she had no idea until about a decade later, when she met François Hénin of perfume house Jovoy Paris, who encouraged her to start her own brand. “I realised it was the opportunity to combine my father’s poems with my fragrances” — an olfactory tribute to a man who wrote largely about dreams and belief, passion, memory and emotion.
Coming from a family of academics — her mother, brother and an aunt are also professors — Bangkok-born Pissara, who studied social psychology and did marketing for some years in a medical faculty, could have taken the same bookish route. But Montri’s stories about his travels turned her gazeato new horizons. And growing up in a house with a lush garden, she picked up know-how on natural ingredients, which sparked her interest in vintage scents and led her to try blending her own.
In 2011, she set off for Paris to immerse in perfumes and learn whatever she could about creating them. She had taken along samples of two of her own blends and hoped Hénin would comment on what was lacking. Instead, he told her he would sell her perfume in his shop.
So Pissara returned to Thailand, confident she would be back in the French capital in months with her own concoctions. Instead, it took her 2½ years to come up with Issara, Melodie de l’Amour and Oudh Infini, whose concepts are based on three aspects of her father’s poetry — freedom, love and travel respectively.
Parfums Dusita was launched in 2016, the brand taking its name from the Thai word for “paradise”. Several years before he died, Montri had penned a piece on this subject. One line says: “For every second when I die, I want to be in Dusita.”
“My father had an independent spirit and he was referring to paradise at a special level, where the artist or writer has the freedom to do whatever he likes,” explains Pissara, who was in Kuala Lumpur recently to launch Pelagos, her latest masculine fragrance, at Trove in Starhill Gallery.
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Pelagos, which contains bergamot, litsea cubeba, sea breeze accord, orris butter, white thyme, tonka bean, leather, sandalwood and patchouli, summons the sense of limitless possibilities and was born out of a happy vacation she had spent on the Aegean Islands. “There, gazing at the sky and sea merging on the horizon, I felt and believed anything was possible.”
For each fragrance Pissara composes, she draws an illustration that captures its essence as well as the poem behind its concept. Montri’s inspiration for Pelagos goes, “Tell me where my limit lies, so I may go up to it/and knock just so gently/to show I am human”.
“My goal is to bring happiness to people through scents and my father’s work, which evokes love, joy, nostalgia and tranquillity. All the fragrances have the same source — a paradise where happiness springs from different states of mind and experiences. It can be an emotional or physical landscape or a place of imagination, and I choose my father’s poetry accordingly. I then develop the story of the scent and its surroundings with dialogue, colours and details, like a short film.”
Her favourite ingredient is jasmine, a flower related to Thai culture. “We give it to people we love and respect. Natural jasmine has many facets. It can round up a perfume in harmonious ways and be hidden completely.”
Formulating scents is fun and the brand now has 15 fragrances. But bringing them to market involves working with multiple suppliers, which Pissara likens to orchestrating a production. The business aspect of things is challenging and one early obstacle was losing thousands of bottles of her stock because she had entrusted someone with its storage.
But every sniff also taught this daughter of scholars something that helped her in the business. She learnt the need for straightforward communication, to point out the good and bad with a view to improve. It is a significant step forward from the Thai way of keeping thoughts to oneself so as not to sound critical, she finds.
Tough lessons and hard work have led to sweet rewards for Pissara, whose fragrances quickly garnered worldwide attention. Melodie de l’Amour was the first one up. It was chosen Fragrance of the Year 2017 at the Art and Olfaction Awards from more than 550 contenders, a surprise honour for which she is still grateful.
Erawan, named after the master of all elephants in the universe, brings to mind the green and wood palette of Southeast Asian rainforests. It was the FIFI Awards’ Breakthrough Fragrance of the Year 2018. In Moscow in 2019, Le Pavillon d’Or was the Niche Customer Choice at the same event. This scent for women and men evokes the joy of serene self-confidence and peace of mind and was inspired by Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan, Lake Guerlédan in Brittany, France, and the Aisawan Triphya-Art pavilion in Thailand.
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Montri, which captures the essence of its namesake’s personality, passions and beliefs and the scents he cherished, was also a FIFI winner in 2022 (Celebrity category).
Smaller awards are just as fulfilling for Pissara, like having five magazine editors single out her scents as their top choices last year and being lauded by perfume sites such as Fragrantica and Çafleurebo for her creations.
She views accolades as a kind of reassurance that her brand is doing certain things the right way. “Not only for me, but also for those on our team. Without them,
I wouldn’t be who I am now. Every time we win, they are even more happy than me.”
But what makes her eyes light up in conversation is the memory of photos of smiling residents in a home her French nurse husband visits regularly, after receiving samples of her perfumes.
“My husband cycles to more than 15 homes daily to help wash and give them their medicine, or even cook for them. He says I am lucky to be in a world where I deal with beautiful things and healthy people. One day I had 30 sets left and passed them to him for the residents. He told me it gave them so much happiness to smell something different.”
What unique thing does she add to make a scent truly hers?
“I put in a lot of love and personality,” says Pissara, who thinks the magic of a concoction is linked to the quality of its natural materials. Scent can trigger a memory. “When I smell something, it could make me think of my childhood, walking under a tree in the garden or being at a certain place.”
Although a perfumer’s work can be pretty lonely, the very act of creation is meditative, she finds. “It’s like being in the moment and that makes me happy.”
Asked at what point she decides there is enough in a concoction and adds no more, she laughs. “That’s a secret. Knowing when to stop is what makes a good perfumer. She should be able to close her eyes, imagine the scent and let it transport her somewhere... to a forest or across a rice field.”
Ultimately, “there is no perfection, because if we strive for that, there is always the goal to do something more. When we do this, we lose a certain beauty”, she believes.
Making perfumes teaches her about balance in life. “We need to be able to play with the raw material, let it live and talk to us. If you take too many [ingredients] and layer too much, the perfume cannot shine.”
For her, fragrance, a lifestyle product, “speaks to you for a certain occasion and gives you a kind of satisfaction as it conveys who you are to the world”.
Pissara has started workshops at Parfums Dusita’s atelier in Paris, where participants get to explore ingredients and compose their dream scents. One can’t help but wonder: Can someone who is sad produce a perfume?
“Actually, my father was not a happy person ... the core of his poetry is nostalgia. He was always thinking about the past or dreaming of the future. I have realised that if people are clinging to the past, they could even cry during the formulation process because a certain raw material may remind them of something.”
Looking ahead, she hopes to expand the artwork she does for her perfumes and use them for different things, probably on porcelain ware.
“I always imagine that because I’m a fan of beautiful coffee cups or some other items. But for now, if I were to do something, I would collaborate with people and create candles or massage oil.”
Like scents, that would involve a combination of art and science and balancing knowledge with passion. Who knows? Poetry could be waiting in the wings.
Parfums Dusita is available at all Trove outlets in KL.
This article first appeared on Sept 16, 2024 in The Edge Malaysia.
