P.Seven

P.Seven is a Taipei perfume house built on Taiwanese tea. Its founder, Pan Yu-ching, worked for five years as a tea master at a tea house in the Grand Hotel Taipei, where tasting tea trained her sense of smell. She started the company in 2012 in a tiny shop off Songjiang Road, NOWnews reported in 2019, and chose Taiwan's tea as the base for her scents. The house calls its idea Taiwan in a bottle.

Its first perfume, Ming, took about 18 months and more than 200 trials, the house says, and is built on the scent left at the bottom of a cup of Jin Xuan tea. Business Today reported in 2022 that for its first six years P.Seven sold only Ming. The range now includes black tea perfumes, an osmanthus and oolong scent, a series of ink scents, and pillow sprays named for places in Taiwan such as Alishan and Sun Moon Lake. Its own pages do not say where the perfume itself is blended.

In Taipei the house runs two shops itself. One is the P.Seven Yongkang concept store at No. 4, Lane 12, Yongkang Street in Da'an, open 10:30 to 21:00. The other is on the second floor of Eslite at Songshan Cultural Park in Xinyi. The LAI HAO Taiwan gift shop on Yongkang Street and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum also stock it. On its own site, a 3 ml mini of Ming costs NT$580 and a 25 ml Golden Osmanthus costs NT$2,450. Try Ming first: it is the scent that started the house, Jin Xuan tea between fir, cypress and a soft, inky base.