Ethos of Cities - Taipei One Day 2023

Finally, a rice perfume that actually smells like rice! I love this one. It is so realistic. The combination of soy milk, rice, and taro almost evokes rice cooked in coconut milk, or the rice you would eat with a curry made with coconut milk. The fragrance is obviously missing the coconut note, but my mind kept trying to parse the creamy, milky, slightly sweet flavoring of the rice as coconut milk. Taro prevents it from being too savory without ever making it excessively sweet. The milkiness works wonderfully here. Now, there is the issue of wearability...I am not sure how practical this is to wear out and about. You will literally smell like rice, as if you just walked out of the kitchen. This is part of what makes the fragrance so unique to me -- it is very unapologetic about what it is and makes no attempt to compromise. I respect that, but it also means it can only be a "home" perfume for me, which makes it a bit harder to justify buying a full bottle.