For Issue 6, TEMPTRESS collaborated with JOUISSANCE parfumes to create a special gift for our readers—a set of scented stickers made to live inside the magazine alongside a short story by Sarah Cleaver and Emma Firth.
We were inspired by the aesthetics of old magazines, where you could scratch the page and smell the fragrance. We teamed up with Cherry Cheng to create something that captures the synergy of TEMPTRESS's charisma and JOUISSANCE's tenderness—and the obsession that lives somewhere in between.
All six covers of Issue 6 are out now. [LINK]
JOUISSANCE is a London-based niche perfume house founded by Cherry Cheng. Since its founding, the brand has built its universe at the intersection of literary eroticism and feminine interiority—composing scents in conversation with canonical women writers, with desire, and with the kind of inner life that a face can conceal but a fragrance cannot.
Issue 6: inside page
Note on the object
Scented stickers work through microencapsulation: fragrance oil is encapsulated within a varnish and printed onto paper. The capsules remain sealed until a fingernail ruptures them—the scent releases in a burst, then fades across three or four scratches before the reservoir is spent.
The fragrance is ultra-fresh, aggressively clean, intrusive, triggering, alpha-coded.
Top: peppermint, neroli, galbanum
Heart: lavender, jasmine
Base: cedarwood, sandalwood, evernyl, leather
Cherry Cheng is the founder and perfumer behind JOUISSANCE, a London-based niche house building its practice at the intersection of literary eroticism, feminine interiority, and the art of scent. Her fragrances have been composed in conversation with canonical texts—from the work of Anaïs Nin to Catherine Millet—treating perfume not as decoration but as a mode of psychological self-disclosure. For Issue 6, she composed an entirely new fragrance in response to a short story by Sarah Cleaver and Emma Firth: a fougère structure spiked with burnt toast and masculine excess, designed to smell like an obsession you cannot reason yourself out of.
We asked Cherry ourselves, so you can skip the introductions. Consider this your first date with JOUISSANCE—we'll start with chemistry.
If JOUISSANCE were a woman arriving late to a party, what would she smell like, what would she say first, and what would everyone misunderstand about her?
For the evening, she'd be wearing La Bague d'O, a chypre rose that feels slightly out of time. She'd apologise for being late, even though it was intentional, as punctuality feels inappropriate in these settings. People might mistake her reticence and quietness for indifference, but she's really just shy.
JOUISSANCE is a room. Describe it.
A boudoir with chiffon dresses, satin slips and lingerie draped everywhere. Low light. A fainting couch. The scent of powders and old perfumes. Worn pages of old books and open diaries. And a very skinny and devious-looking cat lurking somewhere.
JOUISSANCE as a kink—what is it?
Discipline and self-control.
For Issue 6, you created a fragrance specifically for this collaboration. What does it smell like, and what did you want it to do to whoever scratches it?
The story centres on a kind of obsession—being drawn back to someone you know isn't good for you but can't quite let go of. It's a familiar pattern. The male object is a recognisable archetype: drawn to ultra-clean, aggressively fresh, generic "bro" fragrances—the kind of strong fragrance used to mask sweat through a few quick sprays as opposed to actually taking the time to do laundry. So it felt only natural to start with a modern fougère structure, built around an overdose of Dihydromyrcenol (DHM)—the signature freshness of late '80s/'90s men's fragrances, in the vein of trendsetting classics like Cool Water and Drakkar Noir. Specific notes from the story, such as "burnt toast" and "stifling damp odour of sweat and deodorant," were then introduced as accessory notes to disrupt the cleanness.
What changes when you're composing for something still being written—still breathing?
With earlier works, I had more freedom to interpret the texts in a way that fit both the brand and my own perspective—it was less an adaptation than a projection. With the short story, the process was more collaborative. The writing was still being shaped, so the scent developed in dialogue with the writers, Sarah and Emma, ensuring that text and fragrance responded to each other in real time.
What parts of the TEMPTRESS universe felt most interesting to translate into scent?
I was particularly interested in translating exaggerated constructions of femininity and masculinity into olfactory form, and then destabilising them. The TEMPTRESS universe allowed me to explore how scent can both embody and subvert these coded identities, revealing something more complex beneath the surface.
Scratch-and-sniff is nostalgic, tactile, almost unserious. What does a perfume surrender to live inside a paper circle—and what does it gain that a bottle never could?
I'm really drawn to the low-fi, almost DIY nature of scratch-and-sniff—it's a more democratic way of disseminating scent. It's mobile, lightweight, and accessible; you can slip it into an envelope, post it, or place it anywhere without the constraints that come with shipping bottled, alcohol-based perfumes. It creates a different kind of experience. You can encounter multiple scents at once, sometimes at an instructed moment, but ultimately the decision—and the act of releasing the scent—is yours. There's a lineage to this, like the Odorama cards used in cinema, which treated scent as participatory and slightly irreverent. It feels more emancipatory than the passive diffusion typically used in these contexts. You're not simply receiving the scent; you're activating it. At the same time, the act of scratching breaks the illusion—it pulls you out of immersion and exposes the mechanics of the experience, almost like a deliberate rupture of the fourth wall.
The theme of this issue is money. Niche perfumery sells fantasy, intimacy, and excess at a price. When a woman buys perfume—or, in this case, a magazine carrying one—what do you think she is really paying for?
Fantasy and escapism. For me, magazines have always been about that—they construct worlds filled with seductive images and promises that, if you buy into them, you might become a better version of yourself, or someone else entirely. Those promises are rarely fulfilled, but that's almost beside the point. What you're really paying for is the temporary suspension of reality—the chance to inhabit a fantasy, however briefly. It becomes a kind of secular ritual, almost akin to religion: a way of making the mundane, or even the oppressive, feel more liveable.
Scent reveals what the face conceals. What did you want JOUISSANCE to give away?
To restore a sense of enchantment to everyday life—to romanticise the mundane.
Between softness and provocation—which came naturally, and which did you have to learn?
Softness comes more naturally because of how I was raised. My mother is a strong, imposing presence, and I spent my formative years in boarding schools, moving between China, Singapore, and the US. Each shift meant relearning social cues, and I was always aware of not wanting to misstep or seem ill-mannered. So I learned to be attentive, adaptable—soft when needed. But there's also a part of me that resists constantly having to edit myself for the world, that grows impatient and exasperated at times, and wants to push back, to be provocative. Learning to trust that part, and give it space, is still an ongoing learning process.
JOUISSANCE lives in a tradition of Western literary eroticism and feminine self-authorship. TEMPTRESS writes from Ukraine, from a different edge of Europe. What did you find in our world that your usual references don't give you?
I'm really drawn to the idea of destabilising from the margins. Working with you felt like stepping outside the familiar canon of Western literary eroticism into something less fixed, less codified. There's a different tension—historical, political, emotional—that reshapes how desire and femininity are expressed. It offered a vision that feels more precarious, but also more alive. Less about established archetypes, and more about something still in flux—where authorship, identity, and sensuality are continuously being negotiated.
What do people most often misunderstand about eroticism when they try to aestheticise it?
I think the misunderstanding lies in conflating eroticism with pornography. Eroticism is less about display and more about subjectivity—it's a mode of relating to oneself, of holding tension, ambiguity, and agency. Pornography, on the other hand, often appropriates bodies into a consumable fantasy. When people aestheticise eroticism without preserving that interior dimension, it becomes hollow—reduced to surface rather than lived experience.
There's something melancholy about a fragrance that already knows it will end. Did you make this one differently?
There's always something inherently temporal about perfume—it unfolds through an evaporation curve and eventually disappears. That ephemerality is part of its beauty. Of course, we try to preserve scent—through airtight bottles or encapsulation in inks, like with scratch-and-sniff—but even then, we know it won't last forever. In that sense, it mirrors all experiences, pleasurable and otherwise. What's interesting, though, is that fragrance isn't entirely lost. If you have the formula, or the ability to reconstruct it through GCMS or extremely well-trained noses, it can be brought back—much like a musical score, a recipe, or choreography. And yet each re-enactment is never identical. It shifts depending on the interpreter, the materials, the environment, and the audience. Even bottled perfumes vary from batch to batch, especially when working with naturals. That's why traceability becomes so important—it's a way of acknowledging both preservation and change at once.
The short story that inspired this fragrance—co-written by Sarah Cleaver and Emma Firth—is published in full in Issue 6 of TEMPTRESS. The full text will be published online soon. Until then, you know where to find it.