Scent Library

Scent Library — known in Chinese as 气味图书馆 — was founded in Beijing in 2009 by Roseline Lou and John Han with a proposition that distinguished it from the beginning: fragrances built around contemporary Chinese cultural life rather than received European conventions. The turn came in 2015 with a series grounded in everyday domestic nostalgia — the scent of a neighbourhood wet market, a grandmother's kitchen, a particular school notebook — that resonated strongly with Chinese urban consumers and built the brand's core identity. From roughly eighty brick-and-mortar doors in Chinese malls, the brand has expanded aggressively across e-commerce platforms including WeChat and Douyin, reaching the number-two domestic perfume sales position in 2020 and 2021 through live-streaming partnerships. Spanish fragrance group Puig invested in a Series B round reported at ten million dollars, providing international infrastructure for further growth. The partnership marks a meaningful moment in the globalisation of Chinese fragrance culture, with Puig's backing acknowledging that the most interesting new ideas in the category are no longer all European.