Lemongrass & pandan, in a body wash

Pandan is a scent Southeast Asian kitchens have known by heart for generations. Rice pots, chiffon cakes, the dessert drawer in a grandmother’s house. A green, milky-sweet smell that does not quite exist in European perfume tradition, which is part of why we love it.

We paired it with lemongrass because lemongrass is the other half of the kitchen — sharp, citrus-green, awake. On skin, the two together read the way a cool glass of pandan water reads after a long afternoon — unmistakably here, and unmistakably home.

The base is our Mango Butter Hand & Body Cleanser — sulphate-free, paraben-free, silicone-free, composed around mango butter pressed, with quiet reverence, from the kernels inside the mango seeds the fruit industry discards. It emulsifies on contact with water and rinses clean — leaving skin soft rather than stripped.

The scent unfolds differently at different moments. In the first rinse, lemongrass leads — bright, citrus-green, the kind of note that wakes the morning. In the middle, pandan softens it. By the time you step out of the shower, what remains is the warm, milky-sweet tail of the pandan — the scent of something being cooked slowly, with care, somewhere in the house.

Made in Singapore. Shipped in recyclable aluminium. Composed in small batches, because that is the unhurried way.

A short note on pandan, because it is the ingredient most outside the region have not yet come to know by heart.

Pandan is a long-leafed plant — Pandanus amaryllifolius — that grows abundantly across Southeast Asia. The leaves are knotted and dropped into pots of rice, into coconut curries, into the water used to cook glutinous rice cakes at New Year. The scent is grassy and milky at once, with a faint softness of vanilla and warm cream — if either of those were more botanical than they are. It is the scent of the cold drink an auntie made from the refrigerator, of the cake cooling on the counter, of home, for anyone who grew up here.

In a body wash, pandan becomes a gentle surprise. It reads softer than expected, and stranger, and settles onto skin in a way very few fragrance ingredients do. We composed it as it is, with quiet reverence for what the region already knows.

If you are meeting pandan for the first time, the 250ml is the gentler entry. If you already know the scent by heart — and if you grew up here, you do — the 400ml is the bottle that settles onto the shower shelf and stays there for the season.

There is a matching Hand & Body Lotion in the same fragrance, for the layer after the shower. Used together, the scent lands deeper and carries further into the day.

For a broader look at what makes a good body wash for Singapore skin, or the wider category of body wash in Singapore, see our companion notes.