Romance Noire

Sy Truong is a Vietnamese independent perfumer and the founder of Sylhouette Parfums, a perfume house that is rethinking the boundaries of olfactory art.

Born and raised in Vietnam, he discovered his calling at the age of 15, when a bottle of Alien by Thierry Mugler, given to him by his father, transformed his olfactory perception and awakened a deep passion for perfume.

Without access to perfumery schools or high-quality raw materials in his home country, Sy Truong became self-taught. He learned through intensive reading, online resources, trial and error, and began importing materials from France and the United States to master the materials and refine his technique.

His work is guided by a deeply emotional and conceptual approach: he seeks to create compositions that not only smell good, but also tell stories and provoke thought. His first fragrance, Molotov Cocktail (2023), was conceived as an artistic response to the war in Ukraine, an olfactory manifesto that explores accords of blood, metal, and burnt rubber rather than traditional beauty.

At Sylhouette Parfums, Sy Truong continues to explore bold themes of tension, contrast, memory, and poetry, incorporating intriguing materials and innovative olfactory structures. For him, perfume is a radical and personal means of artistic expression, inviting thought as much as smell.