Being a regular at a perfume store is a $160-a-visit habit few of us can sustain. Being a regular at LA’s, Seoul’s, and NYC’s Elorea, though? Easy enough, once you find out about their beverage menu. Thankfully, it’s not a speak-easy situation where you whisper a code word to a staff member and they whisk you to a secret bar behind a portrait or something. (I hate charades.) Just wander beyond the fragrance displays in the front of the store and your curious ambling will be rewarded. There, you’ll find each latte and spritz is a delightful opportunity to drink Elorea’s scents. Sort of…
I popped into the Soho store weeks ago to experience their new fragrance collection: About Love, four scents—Prelude, With You, Closer, and Quiet Trace—that explore how love is felt, understood, and remembered. Then I made my way to the back of the store, where a bench with sleek little round tables lined a corridor to the beverage bar. A “soy sauce foam” coffee caught my eye, inspired by the fragrance Jang. Before you scrunch your nose at the idea of smelling like dank soy sauce, the perfume iteration of this concept creates a smoky, faintly boozy, almost savory gourmand—it’s one of my favorite Elorea scents. Think charred whiskey and warm amber. It’s hard to put my finger on, but there is a salty edge that gives it a mineral quality on skin (the elusive soybean, probably).
My barista spritzed Jang on a tester card, placed it alongside my drink order on the counter, and told me to sniff before sipping for the full experience. Jang, the beverage, was a delicious, not-too-sweet latte with a dare-I-say umami note tempering the creaminess of the milky foam. Inhaling the fragrance before sipping its edible counterpart is such a uniquely sensorial way to get to know a fragrance.
There are only so many ways to describe a gourmand before you have to actually taste it to know what’s up. What makes the drink menu so clever is that Elorea isn’t really a gourmand brand. There’s a jasmine cream-topped matcha to go with their fragrance Heaven, an elderflower and citrus spritz for Hazy Blue, and something called a “rice creamsicle” for their Cloud Daze fragrance. There’s also a chocolate tasting flight to sniff and taste for a delicious intro to the debut collection—a very cute date idea, if you ask me.
On the way out, beverage in hand, I did a lap around the scent displays, reacquainting myself with Elorea’s full offerings. Each four-scent collection is themed around a different part of Korean culture—the real, lived culture beyond K-pop or K-beauty. The debut collection is named after the four universal elements on the South Korean flag: Heaven, Earth, Fire, and Water. The second collection, Forgotten Words, takes its names from Korean terms that describe uniquely cultural moments or practices, like the perfect arrangement of fruit or flowers on a single stem (송아리) with Inflorescence, or the specific rain that follows a harvest (잠 비) in Gentle Shower, or my favorite, the specific feeling of “yearning for someone with an earnest heart” (흐노니) in Be By My Side. (It seems like nobody wants to 흐노니 these days!)
Korean culture has kind of been everywhere for a minute now, but learning pieces of its history through beautiful fragrances is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back every time Elorea releases a new collection. Plus, I just know the new bev menu is going to be delicious.
Photo via ITG