Founder's Journey
Story of Founder
If you gave Joyce Lian a whiff of your dinner, she could likely name the spices hidden within it. This wasn't a gift she was born with; it was a language she spent years learning to speak.
A Childhood in Bloom
Joyce grew up in a home defined by scent. In the kitchen, the air was filled with the aroma of pandan, steamed rice, and cracked black pepper. Along the corridor outside, her father tended to a garden of jasmine, roses, lime, and lotus flowers. These smells, ordinary, and entirely Singaporean, were the silent background music of her daily life.
Her path to perfumery was a serendipitous turn. In 2013, a shift from her dream of dermatology led her to a Diploma in Perfumery and Cosmetic Science. When she first walked into a classroom surrounded by amber bottles and rows of smelling strips, she realized she had found her medium to express her creativity. "It was the perfect combination of art and science," she recalls. "A sensory world that required both a chemist’s knowledge and an artist’s soul."
The Discipline of the Nose
Passion alone wasn't enough. Not possessing a "natural" superior sense of smell, Joyce built hers through relentless hard work. She spent hours in the lab training her nose to differentiate the subtle nuances between peppermint and spearmint, or lemon and lime.
During an internship at IFF (International Flavors and Fragrances, one of the Big Five firms), Joyce did more than just compound formulas. She set up a new Perfumer's Organ where she have a vast library of raw materials at her cubicle, staying long after working hours until the corridor lights went down, memorizing scents and presenting her own formulations to perfumers. This tenacity led to a second internship evaluating scents for personal care, haircare and fine fragrances.
One of her earliest work before starting Scent Journer was in 2016 when she collaborated with Maritime Port Authority of Singapore to create a maritime-themed scent to alleviate seasickness.
Later, while studying chemistry at the National University of Singapore, she interned in Symrise, a top German fragrance house. There, she applied analytical chemistry to analyze natural raw materials through gas chromatography, learning to understand the underlying composition of every scent at a molecular level.
Finding the Way Back
Despite her expertise, the industry didn't have a place for her yet. Joyce worked as a cosmetic chemist and even spent time in banking. She hit her targets, but something felt missing. "I felt emotionally hollow," she says. "Like something essential had gone quiet."
The turning point came one weekend while she was clearing out her room and found a small box of old fragrance projects. Opening a single vial, the version of herself she’d nearly forgotten rushed back in a single breath. She realized her time in the lab had given her technical skill, and her time in banking had given her the interpersonal skills. She was ready to build her own path. In 2020, she left her job and joined a venture-building programme to bring Scent Journer to life.
Humidity as a Canvas
Before a single bottle was formulated, Joyce sat down with over 300 people. She noticed a common thread: fine perfumery felt remote. The ingredients were unfamiliar, and the stories belonged to somewhere else. People often chose what was popular or what smelled "nice" on a paper strip, without truly connecting to the fragrance. Most scents were designed for the cold streets of Paris or New York. In Singapore’s heat, they became heavy, cloying, or simply disappeared.
Joyce realized that no one was making fine fragrance specifically for this part of the world, with an understanding of the humidity we breathe and the ingredients we grew up with. In 2021, after a hundred modifications, her first fragrance, Clouds in Heaven, was born.
To reveal the extraordinary soul of Asian botanicals
At Scent Journer, we don't choose ingredients for novelty. We choose them because they are woven into the fabric of Asian life. Joyce takes these familiar notes and translates them into something refined, lasting, and deeply personal. Our purpose is to elevate regional botanicals into refined, breathable fragrances that you can journey in.
Every bottle is embossed with the yellow-vented bulbul, a native bird in Singapore that most walk past without noticing. It was also Joyce’s first pet. It serves as a reminder to create with genuine love and to find the stories in the things we often overlook.
"Perfection is a hundred tiny adjustments. Designing for Singapore’s heat means evaluating, tweaking, and re-evaluating until a scent feels comfortable yet lasting. We take the things you already love, like pandan or jasmine, and show them to you in a way you've never seen before.
We don't create scents for the special occasions you're waiting for; we create scents for the life you are already living."
Scent Journer: Your journey, beautifully encapsulated.
