Packing light, smelling expensive among Mexico City's fragrance landscape
On tuberose and ambitious retail design at Xinu in CDMX
There are many compliments in life one can bestow upon me that will leave me blushing and doing a mental high kick when received: telling me I have a beautiful aura, complimenting my voice, or telling me I smell good. Eeeee! Let any of these compliments come from the lips of a woman (or a child under the age of 10) and you can’t tell me sh*t for the rest of the day.
Like many elder millennial who has burrowed into niche obsessions to help us cope with the late stage effects of capitalism and over productivity (Snail mail clubs! Collecting glassware! Bread baking) I have taken up collecting fragrances in painfully beautiful vessels in the pursuit of finding my signature scent. And that pursuit recently lead me through the staggering landscape of stunning and uniquely designed fragrance stores in Mexico City. But let’s be real: Mexico’s award-winning retail design in general has been leading the pack for awhile. It magnifies the natural elements around it that are part of its history so organically so that the experience is reverential and not just well curated—although it has the latter in spades.
A few months ago one of my best girlfriends, Dian, and I planned a vacation to Mexico City for a week of respite and restaurants, art and charm. (At the bottom of this post are places I highly recommend you visit to eat!). I remembered the hosts from one of my favorite podcast — Vibe Check— visiting a stunning fragrance shop in Mexico City from about a year prior that I took a screen grab of and found—making a mental note to check it out whenever I visited next. The shop was called Xinu, meaning “nose” and whose name is inspired by the Otomi language indigenous to central Mexico.
Like many gems scattered among Mexico City’s retail space, Xinu felt nearly hidden. We entered what looks like an apartment building from the outside and ascend three floors until we come to a sprawling space on the roof with a massive glass table scattered with objects in the center of the store that could be the most decadent perfumerie or a museum exhibit curated by an architect. We come to understand the cadence for how we are invite to move around this table of scents: start by choosing a bottle to spray, then remove a long hand carved wooden stem from a custom made glass vessel to see how the fragrance develops over a few hours, and then sniff a small mesh cloth to see how the fragrance transforms and softens even more over the last few hours of the day. It’s a delightfully refreshing approach to sampling perfume akin to wine tasting. How thoughtful to understand the lifespan of a fragrance vs just a momentary meeting.
The bottles are what drew me here. Each half moon-shaped vessel at Xinu is handcrafted using local wood and craftspeople who hand blow the glass. Because sustainability is also woven into the tapestry of design, they also are meant to be repurposed when they are empty. The wooden cap becomes a stand for the glass vessel, to be used in innumerable ways.
A thing I wasn’t aware of before my visit was that tuberose was native to Mexico City. The intoxicating perennial, sweet like summer and warm like jasmine, is a frequent note in many of the fragrances here. It was floating everywhere we went in the city, including a fragrance shop in Condesa we had visited just a few hours before called Fuegia 1833, a shop that makes fragrances exclusively from plants. I bought their hypnotic Flor de Hueso as part of a sample box, with notes of tuberose, vanilla, and copal.
But back to Xinu, it was the “Aguamadre” that bewitched from the first spritz. A lusty dance of salt and smoke with mezcal and lime, cedarwood and agave. A note I wasn’t familiar with prior—guaiac wood—kept flirting with me even as I went around the table trying the five other scents. Low key I really want to be a woman whose body chemistry can carry a smoky, woody, musky scent, but in reality it’s the floral notes that seem to linger and marry well on my skin.
That’s also important to note that Xinu only showcases six scents in its Polanco location, but highlights a spacious side room featuring a different set of specific home fragrances you can only get in candle, room spray or incense form. Each and every portion of the store is Mexico-made or based. The presentation feels minimal with hits warm and muted tones of wood, sand and black onyx. But then you account for all the details of the black pillars and stands and display vessels and it’s staggering the layers.
After you’ve made your purchase and need a place to process the wave of euphoria you now feel after having found your new favorite scent here, you’ll need a place to eat. The world offers no shortage of great recommendation of places to eat in Mexico City. You can toss a stone at one of their gas stations and find a great meal. But here is a short list of places we went on our trip that I loved:
-Rosetta (if they have the sweet potato tamal, macha sauce and buttermilk dish I highly encourage it. You’ll be spooning up what’s left from the bowl).