Barnes Fragrance Fair 2024
See you on 18th May 2024 • 10.00am to 5.00pm • Barnes, LONDON SW13 9HE
MAYA NJIE
Niche perfume brand Maya Njie (pronounced 'Maia N-jai') features a range of five modern artisan fragrances inspired by Maya’s Swedish upbringing and West African heritage, rooted in an old family photo album from the decades before her birth. Maya set out to capture, by way of scent, these moments in time, these tropes of familial life, set within their frames.
'What did it smell like?' The small Swedish summer house surrounded by mercurial forests, the visits to her grandparents’ sparsely furnished flat on Sunday afternoons, Uncle Lars' and Aunt Irene’s shotgun wedding... she sought to bottle the spirit connected to the classic 1970's Scandinavian idyll, combined with the soul of her esoteric Gambian and Senegalese heritage.
By showcasing her photographs and extracting their dreamy colour pallets, she saw to fruition, her desire to reconstruct through her perfumes, those elusive moments which otherwise may have slipped quietly away. The tones are of a time, and the notes nostalgic, yet the end product is notably contemporary.
Maya’s formulas are developed in her London studio, using a variety of essential oils, aroma compounds and resins. Making use of both naturals and synthetics in her creations - it’s nature and science combined. Ingredients such as musk and ambergris are synthetic substitutes and does not derive from its animal origin counterpart. With care and precision, the blends are mixed in small fresh batches, filtered and bottled individually by hand. All scents are all classed as Eau de parfums with a generous oil content of 30% on average.