Perfume review showcase - Born To Stand Out - various perfumers

It’s difficult not to be suspicious about a brand that calls itself Born To Stand Out (sorry, I refuse to remove the spaces between the words). It carries more than a whiff not just of the ‘try-hard’, but also of that other modern blight on the perfume scene: the so-called ‘disruptor’, otherwise known as the brand that proclaims it’s going to shake up the entire industry, re-write the rules and break all the barriers blah blah blah, yawn yawn yawn. The names of many of the scents aren’t especially promising either: NSFW, DGAF and Fig Porn are so adolescent, I suspect even Tom Ford would hesitate to use them for his creations. Finally, there’s the size of the range. For a brand that’s been around only for a few years, the collection is huge, and although all the fragrances have been composed by established, talented scents-makers (under the creative direction of founder Jun Lim), the catalogue as a whole gives the impression that it was put together hastily, with more attention being paid to box-ticking than to creativity.  

Still, the proof is in the smelling, right? And dodgy names aside, it’s exciting to sample the output of a house that comes to us from a country not often represented on the international perfumery scene: South Korea.