When a Thunderstorm Smells Like Goodbye: Na-Moya Lawrence’s Perfume of Grief and Guineps

What does loss smell like when love refuses to stay quiet? For Na-Moya Lawrence, it is the snap of a storm rolling in, the warm hush of butter cookies cooling on a tray, and the tart-green pop of guineps pressed into sticky palms. Her new creation, the perfume inspired by her great-grandmother’s funeral, is not polite. It is alive.

I can picture it. Sky black, air electric, puddles swallowing sandals. Chickens huddling on stoops while the living insist on dancing anyway. That kind of day writes itself into your skin, and Lawrence leans straight into those visceral notes. The rain comes first, a mineral-laced petrichor with a metallic edge, like lightning tracing your scalp. Then the human tenderness arrives, a buttery cookie accord that feels like a kitchen light flipped on at midnight, comforting without tipping into cloying. Finally, guineps, that Caribbean little-green-orb energy known as quenepa or Spanish lime, drops a juicy, slightly tannic brightness that keeps the grief from getting heavy.

Technically, this is a tightrope. Petrichor often blends geosmin or wet-stone facets with a hint of ozone. Butter cookies need vanillic warmth, a browned sugar tone, maybe a lactonic whisper to suggest crumb. Guineps are tricky in perfumery vocabulary, so you chase them through a citrus-pear-green corridor with a pulpy, faintly resinous finish. Get any of these wrong and the fragrance slides into novelty. Here, they click like memory does, not neat, not tidy, but true.

I grew up counting seconds between lightning and thunder, and I know the taste of rain on heat-baked concrete. I also know the exact clink of a cookie tin at a wake when the aunties decide it is time to feed sorrow into silence. Lawrence catches that cultural muscle memory and refuses to simplify it. The result is a scent that moves, that throws an arm around your shoulder, that says we cry now, we dance anyway.

We keep asking perfume to be pretty. Na-Moya Lawrence answers with something brave. The perfume holds hands with the storm and the kitchen and the fruit vendor on the corner. It smells like a life fully lived, then remembered without flinching.