Cherry Cheng spends her free time wandering in and out of London’s bookshops, museums, and art galleries — it’s her love of erotic literature and her background in art history that inspires her work at Jouissance Parfums. She started the company during the pandemic, stuck at home and craving sensual experience, and has since launched three perfumes inspired by French erotic literature written by women. We spoke to Cherry about how a childhood spent moving between countries led to her love of books and films, her experience studying perfumery, her art collection, and more.
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on her morning routine
I usually wake up around 7:00 or 8:0 in the morning. It’s really unhealthy, but I’ll just have a cup of black coffee. Otherwise, I can't get out of bed. Then I check my email and read a little bit. I’ll read things related to my business; usually I save articles and read them in the morning because it’s when I’m the most sharp and focused.
Then, first thing, I do any work-related tasks that I’m dreading. I get them done before 10 o’clock because at 10:00 I go to ballet class. I go every day. I like that structure, and it’s really important for me to go outside somewhere rather than just working from home all day. It’s the thing that’s been grounding me since I started Jouissance, because so much of the work of starting a business felt precarious and disorganized. Having this one thing that I do every day became my touchstone. It helped me mentally and emotionally cope with everything else. When I have to miss a day, I get really upset. I’m pissed off for the rest of the day.
on being an introvert
When I was little, we lived in a suburb of Beijing. I had a fairly normal childhood. I only have a vague memory of that time; it just didn’t feel very eventful. I was always quiet. I enjoyed playing piano, and I loved looking at things.
When I was 12, we moved to Singapore for my parents’ work. That was like the first time I was really struggling to fit into a new environment. There was a language barrier; my English wasn't very good. And when we moved back to China, I started going to international schools where everyone else spoke English, so it was still a problem. I was moving so much, and making friends was a bit challenging, especially as I’m quite introverted anyway. At some point, I just stopped bothering. I kind of retreated into myself. That’s when I started spending a lot of time alone, and I started to get into the habit of reading and watching films. Reading and watching films showed me other things that were possible. I was pirating a lot of films when I was a child.
on studying in different countries
When I was sixteen, I moved to America. I applied to a bunch of boarding schools and the one I got into was in New Hampshire. I didn’t know anything about New Hampshire when I moved, I just wanted to get away from my family and gain some more independence.
When I finished high school, I applied and got into a liberal arts college in upstate New York, but I decided to take a gap year to think it over. I wasn't sure if I wanted to be in an environment quite similar to the one my high school was in, or if I actually wanted to go into a city. In the end, I decided I wanted to be in the city and in another country other than America. The idea of London really fascinated me, so I came here. I did two Master’s degrees; the first was at the Sotheby’s Institute, in art business, and the second was at Goldsmith’s, in contemporary art theory.
on her first encounters with erotic literature & perfume
I was sixteen, and it was a bit random. I was in a bookstore, and they had out some Penguin books, and the cover of Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin caught my attention. It looked beautiful and poetic and sexy. I started reading it and I was fascinated. The writing is so fantastical. It has so many luxurious, sensuous details about the circus, exotic places that she visited, all these fantastical worlds. She talks about desire not just as the erotic act; it's also poetry. She sees male and female approaches to the erotic genre differently; she says women need more poetry. So that was the starting point for me. And then over the years, I didn’t specifically look for erotic writing, but those are the books stuck with me the most because I feel like those are the ones that contain more truth.
I was around the same age when I bought my first perfume. It was Chanel No. 5. I was traveling between China and New Hampshire by myself, and I was looking at the duty-free shop at the airport, and I decided to try this fragrance that everyone talks about.
on how her background in art history influences her work in perfume
I've always been interested in art. It was the one thing I was really good at when I was in high school. But in my senior year, I realized I was more interested in studying the history of art than actually making art myself. So that's what I decided to pursue in college and grad school.
While I was at Goldsmith’s, I was reading a lot of art theory, of course, but the degree also touched on theory across all kinds of visual culture and literature. And so, I was introduced to Helene Cixous’s 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” where she encouraged women to write from their bodies and to write fearlessly and brutally about their desires. She thinks that women have to be transgressive and fearless, stepping outside of the language that was created by men in order to write about their own condition in a more truthful way. That helped me understand why I like the kinds of writing that I like — I love reading books that are written by women, and that talk about desire in a really non-apologetic way. I find that those books are really honest, and genuine, and authentic. And through Cixous, I can understand that I’m drawn to that transgressive quality.
That’s really what gave me the idea to start Jouissance — seeing this overarching idea in the writing I like and wanting to translate that into fragrance. Writing is so cerebral; and I really wanted to take this very bodily writing and create a more sensuous incarnation of it.
I definitely come to perfume with an outsider’s perspective, but sometimes I think that’s to my advantage. I think about perfume in a really interdisciplinary way.
on perfume as cultural history
When I was studying art history, I was especially focused on the turn of the 20th century. And modern perfumery really started at that same time. It's interesting to me to see how trends in fragrance connect with artistic movements, and also with trends in fashion, and what’s happening politically.
A classic example would be L'Air du Temps by Nina Ricci. It was created just after the war, in ’48. It was really a celebration of the end of the Second World War. The fragrance itself is quite subtle; it's a floral composition, but it's also very much a skin scent — it smells quite differently on different women. It doesn't have a very strong character in itself, so it's very airy. It’s kind of a celebration of hope and the joy of a new beginning after a really traumatic time for Europe.
on the importance of slowing down
In the beginning, all the mistakes I made were because I was trying to do things too quickly. From the initial business idea to the launch, it took two years. To me, that felt like a long time. I think nowadays, especially for your first business or your first anything, you feel like you're desperate to prove yourself. You want it really fast. I struggled with that so much in the first two years of working on the business. But in the end, I’m so glad that we took the time to make sure everything was right, like with the packaging and the formulas, rather than pushing to get something out that wasn’t ready. You only get one chance to introduce yourself. So, my advice would be to be patient.
on perfume as a luxury product
Growing up, there wasn’t much fragrance around. My earliest scent memory is probably this specific type of Florida water. If you’re from China, you know it. When I was growing up, literally every single household in China only had that, because fine fragrance wasn't such a thing in China in the nineties and early 2000s. We didn’t have Western fragrance, and we didn't really have any local brands either. Most people in my parents’ generation grew up in quite a frugal way, and perfume was viewed as this kind of lavish thing. It wasn’t until later in the 2000s that Western luxury was imported to China. Now everyone’s super obsessed with luxury handbags, cars, everything. It happened very quickly; now there’s this sense of competitiveness. When I was a small child, most households were more or less equal, and then some people became really rich, really quickly, and Western luxury became a status symbol for people who could afford it. That’s not a huge thing for me; I’m not obsessed with luxury, but I do appreciate things when they’re genuinely beautiful.
on her changing relationship to fragrance
I have more early memories of unpleasant smells, like the smell of hospitals. My family owns a hospital in China, and I would sometimes stop into the hospital to see my parents at work, so I don’t really have negative associations with hospitals. But I really don’t like the smell. It’s antiseptic — but it’s also the scent of cleanliness, which is important to me. My mom is the biggest germaphobe; she’ll wipe everything down with alcohol.
When I was studying art history, I was drawn to the visual aspect of perfumes, the design. It’s kind of paradoxical, but the pandemic was the time when I really started using my sense of smell. Before, it was more in the background, more subconscious. But then, during COVID, I had so much free time, so I bought fragrances from eBay. I was reading a lot about them, trying to understand the history behind classic fragrances and the trends in perfumery. And then I started taking online courses to learn about the construction of perfumes.
Then, after the lockdown, I went to Grasse in France for the summer to do a perfume course. That’s where I started to meet more people in the industry. Eventually I was introduced to a fragrance composition house in the U.K., and we started Jouissance together.
on her time at the grasse institute for perfumery
The courses I took were introductory level, because I was coming to it without a background in perfumery. We spent a lot of time doing lab work, learning how to weigh out formulas, all the basic things. The good thing about going into an institute, as opposed to studying on your own, is that you have access to their whole library of raw materials. They must have 400 or 500 ingredients that were available to us to smell. We got to learn so many ingredients over a short span of time.
They also took us on site visits. I did multiple different courses at different times over the last few years. One of my favorites was in May, at the time of the rose harvest. They actually took us out into the field, and we were picking roses ourselves. They wanted us to really smell the fresh flowers. Then they took us to the distillery to see how that scent was going to be distilled. It was amazing, being about to have that experience, smelling the fresh flowers. Now, when I’m home, I can remember that and use that in my work.
on studying with a master perfumer
I’ve been studying privately with the perfumer Antione Lee. He lives in Paris and I live in London. So, we don't see each other every day, but we talk almost every day, and I visit him in Paris every other month. He has a very analytical approach.
In the first stage of our work together, we started with flowers. He would give me a formula he mixed himself, consisting of maybe five ingredients. He would tell me the ingredients, but not the percentages of each one in the formula. I just had to smell them and try to figure out the right percentages. I’ve done tons of those now, probably four variations for each flower. And that was to train my nose to be familiar with ingredients and how they interact with one another.
The second stage of our work was about synthetic ingredients. Using only twenty synthetic ingredients, I would try to recreate the natural scent of a flower. That helped me understand how synthetic ingredients work, how they work together, and their strength. Sometimes there’s an ingredient that’s very powerful, so you can’t use too much in the composition or it’ll just smell like that and nothing else. It’s about learning the balance.
Now I’m at the third stage. It’s the most fun part — I’m working on recreating classic fragrances. For example, L’Air du Temps was the one I was studying earlier this year. Antoine would also give me the fragrance in the perfume bottle. And I would try to replicate the formula just by smelling it. It took me like forty trials before I finally got it right. In the beginning, you really have no idea; it takes a lot of trial and error. At times, it’s really frustrating, but it’s also fun to try to understand the composition and why particular decisions about the makeup of the fragrance were made. Through figuring out the formula, I come to understand why this composition was successful and why this fragrance was so innovative at the time.
on learning the language of perfume
My training in perfumery has enabled me to talk about scent in a more systematic way. That’s definitely something I’ve learned over time. I compare it to art history; like any other art form, you have to learn the language to describe it. One of the first things you learn as a perfumery student is like a color wheel for fragrance notes. You learn the major families — the citrus family, the flower family. Then you learn the vocabulary that perfumers use to describe scent. For example, metallic. You can describe the smell of aldehydes as metallic. You can use balsamic to describe the smell of vanilla and tonka bean. Once you really learn this system of language and you start to practice, you can fit the things you smell into these categories.
Of course, the categories are useful, but you still have your own interpretation of scents. It’s really helpful to think about what a smell means to you. It could be something random, like this smell reminds me of, I don’t know, my aunt’s coat, or something like that, but that specificity is helpful.
on finding beauty in ease
I'm really a deeply uncomfortable, awkward person, and I think maybe that’s why what I find beautiful are things that are natural and effortless and comfortable. My definitions of beauty and eroticism aren’t rigid; they’re evolving. I’m drawn to different things every year — different types of art, different kinds of clothing. It's always been a bit in flux. When I was younger, I was trying to force a certain idea; now, I try to focus on what intuitively feels right for me. I find that naturalness and ease in myself at certain moments, but not all the time.
on her favorite perfumes
Some people really believe in having a signature scent. But I believe in having many, many signatures, depending on the context, the mood, where you're going, what time of year it is.
There are a lot of perfumes that are really close to my heart. I love Tabac Blond by Caron. It was created for flapper girls in the 1920s. Nowadays, of course, it smells a little bit different than the original. But it’s supposed to smell like tobacco and honey. I also really love L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain. It's also an old one; it was created around the same time. I love those older, classical perfumes that were created before the Second World War because that’s also the period of art history I was most drawn to.
on her art collection
While I was studying art history, I had a few internships with curators and galleries, and then I worked in the commercial art world. Even today, most of my friends work in the art world.
A lot of the pieces I have at home are from friends; either I'm friends with the artists or I'm friends with the gallerist. But this is one that I got from an auction, by Yannis Tsarouchis. He is an iconic queer artist from the early 20th century in Greece. He also did a lot of theater and performance design. He created a set and costumes for the ballet, which I really love. I find his work really dreamy and lyrical. Most of the other pieces that I have are by younger artists. I have a piece by Emily Ponsonby, which she drew with beeswax. And then, the gold leaf is by Nat Faulkner. He's also a younger artist. This one is really interesting. He's a photographer, and his main practice is about the medium of photography itself. For this piece, he collected the waste processing chemicals from different dark rooms around London. And then he used those chemicals, putting them on a plate to create this effect. He created a series of these. I think they're really cool because it's his work, but it also has the influence of so many other people — the people who were processing these chemicals, but also the people they were photographing. And then my favorite piece is a portrait of my cat.
“I’m always trying to figure out a way to be. I think women are asked to be so cohesive, especially now, in the age of social media, where you’re asked to turn yourself into a brand. There’s a way you’re expected to behave; everything is supposed to make sense. And I often find myself feeling like what I want to do is different than what I am doing. I struggle with that a lot; it’s a really reductive way of living. Reading women’s writing helps me see different ways to be.”
on her favorite books
Perfume Legends gives a brief overview of a lot of iconic French feminine fragrances that were created over the 20th century — Chanel No. 5, Mitsouko, Femme. This book does a great job explaining why certain perfumes become a classic — what they did that was innovative in terms of the composition of the fragrance, but also the marketing, the packaging, the design. It’s also beautifully illustrated, which I love. It’s been the most incredible sourcebook for me in terms of perfumery.
Nez publishes writing by perfumers. I have here one by Dominique Ropion and one by Mathilde Laurent. They're like two perfumers I really admire because they don’t just see perfume as a product. They see perfumery as a medium for artistic expression. And that comes through in the way they write about it.
I love Anaïs Nin’s lectures. She wrote across all six decades of her life; she obsessively kept a diary. But she really rose to notoriety when she moved back to America and started giving lectures all across the country. It was around the same time as second-wave feminism, and she was quite controversial because her kind of feminism is more subtle and soft. I find her lectures really inspiring because even though they’re based on her very personal writing, she’s performing; she created this whole public persona based on her most private writing. I find that more interesting than her fiction.
And then Damage is another one of my favorite books. It’s been turned into a film by Louis Malle. Josephine Hart, the author, had an interesting life. When she was young, two of her siblings passed away in freak accidents. And then she went on to write a lot about guilt and death and tragedy in her work. I find it really beautiful.
And then this book by Erica Jong, which I just read recently. It’s really fun to read. Her boyfriend is a psychoanalyst, and she’s having a crisis in this long-term relationship. At the same time, she’s seeing this other man who represents freedom. It’s basically about a woman caught between two ways of living. And she’s really, really funny.
There's also a comic version of The Story of O, which I really love.
on what she’s reading now
Nowadays, I read a lot more contemporary fiction. I used to not read much of it, but I think something changed two or three years ago. I guess since COVID. I've become more into narrative these days. The inspiration for the brand is more nostalgic, mostly early 20th century. I think that's why reading contemporary fiction just feels like pure relaxation. The language is also easier, and a lot of the time, it's funnier. The book I've been reading recently is Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan. It's so gripping, I can't stop reading.
on her favorite films
A lot of the books I enjoy reading have been turned into films; some of them have even been adapted more than once. I really love having that visual interpretation of the writing. And it’s so interesting that when the same writing is interpreted by more than one filmmaker, it can turn out so differently. When I'm trying to interpret a work as a fragrance, I'm bringing my subjectivity into it; it's not just about the work itself. It’s the same with film adaptations.
I love the director Walerian Borowczyk; I love the way he interprets things visually.
Sometimes I'm also tempted to look at films without an interesting narrative; something that's just a visual spectacle. I love that because there's so much inspiration you can take from films like that.
One film that I watch every single year is Betty Blue. I just think it's so beautiful. There’s so much turbulence. I love seeing complex female characters on screen — I love the ones that are really crazy.
cherry’s favorite spots in london
John Sandoe is definitely my number one bookstore. They have amazing sections full of design books, art books, and gardening books. And on the second floor, where they have all the fiction, I’ll sometimes stumble upon lesser-known titles by well-known authors, which is really interesting. And it's just beautiful. Tenderbooks is another one of my favorite bookshops. There's an amazing bookstore called Ram Books. It's in East London, and they specialize in erotica. I also like Idea Books and Climax Books—you can also shop those two online as well.
For museums, I like the Courtauld. For galleries, I like CASSIUS&Co. They’re kind of between a gallery and a rare book shop.
