Parfum Satori

Parfum Satori is the house of Satori Osawa, a perfumer born in Tokyo who studied the Urasenke tea ceremony and Sogetsu flower arranging from the age of 12 and holds a tea name. She began studying perfume in 1988, and in 1998 she trained under Kenji Maruyama, a former chief perfumer at Firmenich. She opened her salon in 2000 and released the first collection under the Parfum Satori name in 2003. In 2019 her perfumes entered the collection of the International Perfume Museum in Grasse.

The house describes its scents as perfume for graceful movement, drawn from the gestures of the tea ceremony. It compares wearing them to walking the roji, the stepping-stone garden path that leads to a tea room. The range has three lines: a Basic collection, a Premium collection built mainly on natural materials, and Parfum EX, a stronger extrait series. In 2018 it became the first independent Japanese brand listed in Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and others.

To smell the whole range, go to its own atelier shop on the second floor of the OURS building, 3-6-8 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo. The shop holds about 1,000 perfume materials, vintage perfumes and books. It is open every day from 11:00 to 17:00, with last entry at 16:30, and visitors take off their shoes at the door. A 50 ml bottle of Satori costs 21,120 yen, and a set of five 2 ml trial vials costs 9,680 yen. Try Satori first: the house calls it its representative work, and it is built around kyara, the finest grade of agarwood used in Japanese incense.