Strangers Parfumerie — Sweet Farewell
Essence
Sweet Farewell is a coconut-rice gourmand built from kanom jaak, a Thai dessert made with rice powder, palm sugar, coconut milk, pandan, and nipa palm leaves, then grilled in its wrapper. Prin Lomros turns that memory into a warm, creamy fragrance with enough green leaf and dry wood to keep it from collapsing into beach-lotion sweetness.
Scent Profile
The opening is the sweetest and most projecting stage. Palm-sugar caramel, condensed coconut milk, vanilla, and rice powder arrive together, while pandan adds a grassy, nutty, green-vanilla thread. That pandan detail is crucial: it makes the perfume feel like a particular dessert rather than a generic coconut sugar accord. Nipa palm leaf adds a faint tea-like, smoky green note that suggests the dessert’s grilled wrapper. As the opening settles, coconut milk and rice powder become creamier and softer, closer to coconut rice pudding. Palm sugar contributes a slightly savory depth, so the sweetness does not read as flat candy. Later, the fragrance becomes a quieter musky vanilla skin scent. Cashmeran, cedar, ebony, sandalwood, and tonka dry out the base, leaving a little woody spice beneath the remaining coconut and rice. The scent develops clearly rather than staying linear: bright dessert first, creamy rice middle, then soft cashmere woods.
Performance
The opening can be strong, particularly on skin that amplifies vanilla, before settling closer. Many wears last through much of a day, although the later stage is softer and some skins experience less projection. Start with a measured application; body warmth can revive the sweet materials after they have gone quiet.
Wearing Context
Cool weather and shoulder seasons are its best setting. It is cozy, casual, intimate, and easy enough for daytime, but it is not a formal power scent. In humid heat, the dessert sweetness can become too much for some wearers. It reads genuinely unisex, with a slightly feminine association only because it is sweet and creamy.
Comparisons & DNA
Chokedee is the closest house comparison, sharing pandan, rice, and coconut but taking them in a louder, sweeter, more floral-fruity direction. Sweet Celestials uses related materials but is greener, more floral, and more aquatic. Sweet Farewell is the warmer, woodier, more vanillic member of that informal family. Outside the house, it belongs with creamy tropical gourmands, but its pandan, nipa palm, and realistic rice-powder facets are unusual. The fragrance is about a specific grilled dessert rather than a generic coconut-vanilla effect.
Reception
Praise centers on the realistic coconut-rice idea, the comfort of the drydown, and the nostalgic specificity of pandan and grilled palm leaf. It is especially appealing to wearers who want a food-inspired fragrance to feel regional and lived-in rather than merely sugary. The divide is sweetness and performance. Some find it beautifully balanced; others find the later vanilla too generic, the gourmand opening too rich, or the rice and pandan less prominent than hoped. It is more sample-friendly than blind-buy safe for anyone who does not already enjoy creamy dessert scents.
Versions & Reformulation
Sweet Farewell is a 2022 EDP with no known formula rewrite. Chokedee and Sweet Celestials are related pandan-rice-coconut fragrances, not variants of the same composition.
Acquisition Notes
It is usually sold in a 30 ml format in the accessible indie-niche tier, with samples and small decants useful for testing its sweetness on skin. Availability may fluctuate, but fit matters more than finding a particular bottle because the coconut-rice accord is so personal.
Notable Facts & Lore
- Sweet Farewell is based on kanom jaak, a grilled Thai dessert of coconut, rice, palm sugar, pandan, and nipa palm leaf.
- Its title is a bilingual play because the Thai word for the leaf can also mean goodbye.
- The perfume preserves a childhood dessert that Lomros described as increasingly hard to find.