Founded by Cherry Cheng, Jouissance creates perfumes that renew a woman’s relationship to her body and sexuality by translating erotic literature into scent
- Who is it? Jouissance is the perfume brand from Cherry Cheng evoking female erotic literature through scent
- Why do I want it? Intelligent fragrances which, through their literary inspirations, encourage the wearer to reconnect with their own bodies and sexuality
- Where can I find it? Each perfume is currently available for pre-order from the Jouissance website, with further stockists to be announced
Who is it? For Cherry Cheng, literature and scent became vital lifelines to escape the confines of her home during the Covid-19 pandemic. “I love reading but I really need to be in a certain mood or state of mind to immerse myself,” she reflects, “so I ordered a lot of perfume samples as the experience is very instantaneous. When I smell something, I immediately feel.” With time on her hands, Cheng enrolled in an online perfumery course which fanned her idea for Jouissance: perfumes that renew a woman’s relationship to her body and sexuality by translating the founder’s favourite erotic literature into scent.
Cheng’s literary taste has revolved, for as long as she can remember, around books with “this overarching theme of a complex female character and this aesthetic of eroticism.” During her MA at Goldsmiths in London, she was introduced to Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa, an essay in which the author extols women to “write the body” and to reclaim the “dark continent of their sexuality.” In doing so, the French feminist critic reappropriated the term jouissance (the French word for ‘enjoyment’) to describe the explosive mental, spiritual, and corporal experience of women’s sexual pleasure. “That term explained and tied together everything I was interested in,” explains Cheng, “So that’s how the name Jouissance came about for the perfume brand.”
For her debut collection, Cheng chose to fragrance the sensual universes of three books that she keeps coming back to: Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1954), The Sexual Life of Catherine M (2001) by Catherine Millet, and The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1966). Each are by “complex female creatives, writing about themselves or about characters that are as equally complex.” The perfumes derive their names from the books – Bague d’O, En Plein Air, and Les Cahiers Secrets – and are accompanied by cheeky scent notes like “wear En Plein Air if you want to smell like an unassuming art critic on her way to an orgy.”
Why do I want it? Through imaginative, complex scents, Cheng revives lusty worlds that have been skirted to literary fringes because of their erotic contents. If there is a common floral composition to each fragrance, the differentiating notes were derived from her intelligent sensory translation of each work. The Diary of Anaïs Nin was somewhat easy to evoke through scent due to literal mentions of sense and place, but such a direct translation was impossible for The Secret Life of O. “I took an approach where it’s traditionally quite feminine, voluptuous, beautiful but then contrasted with something dirty, dark, denser,” explains Cheng. The resulting perfume, Bague d’O, notably involves metallic notes, evoking the steel chains with which the main character was tied up by her lover as well as the ring she receives as a sign of her submission to him. With En Plein Air, Cheng decided upon a summery fragrance which recalls the outdoor orgies of the 1970s that the protagonist of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. would partake in, cut with citrus notes to invoke the character’s position as an acerbic art critic.
As Jouissance is envisaged as a whole sensory experience, Cheng paid extraordinary attention to the packaging: the smoothed oval bottles lie on luscious silk folds within grained boxes. “I wanted to replicate vintage perfume which comes with these amazing silk inlay boxes,” she explains. “I want every detail of the product to be sensory and tactile, to feel something.” Cheng envisages that the perfumes will eventually be sold in bookstores as well as museum gift shops, where they will perhaps be most at home.
The brilliance of Jouissance perfumes however is not just in their scent, but in how they promote female authors that have been cast to the literary shadows thanks to their celebration of female eroticism. In doing so, Cheng encourages the wearer to use her perfumes to rediscover their own bodies and sexuality. As the brand continues to grow, she plans to continue this theme – “at least for the time being, because there are just so many more inspiring authors and works that I can already imagine in perfumes.”
Where can I find it? Each perfume is currently available for pre-order from the Jouissance website, with further stockists to be announced.
