“Scent is not something you study in order to understand. It is something you feel and judge intuitively.”
— Cha Haeyoung, founder (translated from Korean)
NONFICTION is a brand from South Korea that proposes time to return to one’s unadorned self through scent. Its starting point was its founder’s bath time: the moment in a busy day when she could finally be alone.
Basic Information
Brand launch: November 2019, Seoul, South Korea.
Founder: Cha Haeyoung.
Official websites: Official Japanese website / Official global website
NONFICTION is a lifestyle beauty brand centered on perfume and scented body-care products. Washing the body, moisturizing, and applying fragrance: it sees these everyday acts as small rituals through which to restore oneself.
The Founder and the Origins of the Brand
A Career That Began in Fashion
Cha Haeyoung was born in Seoul and grew up in Busan. After graduating from university, she started a clothing business, moving from a small shop near the university to running the multibrand fashion boutique Product.
She worked in clothing for nearly ten years. Although she had entered the field out of love for it, she says that over time it stopped awakening new curiosity in her.
Scented everyday products, meanwhile, had long been part of her life. During a short period of study in New York in her mid-twenties, she shared an apartment with a roommate and bought niche-brand candles and high-quality body products even if it meant economizing on food.
Placing scent within daily life, rather than using perfume only as something to wear on special occasions, was a pleasure Cha had known long before founding the brand.
Encountering Art
When her interest in fashion began to fade, her friend, actor Yoo Ah-in, invited her to help create a place supporting young makers. It would be a space for talented people who nevertheless found it difficult to communicate their work and activities to the world.
Cha joined the founding of Studio Concrete, an artists’ group established in 2014. Photographers, painters, and graphic designers came together to establish a base in Seoul with a gallery, studio, shop, and café.
For Cha, who had worked with clothes, culture and contemporary art were new territory. Looking back on that transition, she says that not knowing very much was precisely what allowed her to be brave.
As she worked with different artists, another ambition gradually grew: to engage deeply with a single category and create a highly accomplished brand. She chose perfume and body products, which she had personally enjoyed for many years.
An Idea Born in the Bathroom
For Cha, bathing was precious time alone, away from people, work, and her smartphone. Looking at the scented products beside the bathtub, she realized how they enriched that time and began to think about creating products that could deepen the ritual of self-care herself.
“It is necessary to make time for yourself, even if it is only a short time.”
— Cha Haeyoung (translated from Korean)
The “rituals” NONFICTION deals with are not grand affairs. Washing the body, applying cream, and putting on fragrance: within repeated acts, they create time to turn awareness back toward oneself after it has been directed outward.
The current brand story expresses the same idea through three words: ritual, reset, and refresh. Scent is a medium not so much for escaping everyday life as for recovering oneself within it.
The Name “NONFICTION”
Hundreds of possible brand names were considered. What mattered to Cha was not inventing a nonexistent story to make the brand appear richer.
While considering the name, the team took the experience of bath time as a starting point for discussing what a real life and a false life might be. The final choice was NONFICTION, meaning not fiction, but things as they are.
The slightly incongruous feeling of a name unlike those usually given to cosmetics was another reason for choosing it. She thought it would catch people’s attention and spark interest in the brand’s thinking.
“What other people see is fiction.”
— Cha Haeyoung (translated from English)
Not how one looks to others, but what one feels oneself: the name NONFICTION contains that shift in perspective.
From Fragrance Devotee to Founder
Cha is not a perfumer who built her experience within the fragrance industry. On the contrary, she says that she initially believed good fragrances were made abroad and had not even considered creating her own perfume in South Korea.
Yet she had a clear idea of the scents she wanted to use and the world through which she wanted to deliver them. Through collaboration with specialists, she transformed the sensibility cultivated as an enthusiastic fragrance user into products.
NONFICTION launched in November 2019 and entered Sephora around the same time. For its entry, it presented through the normal assessment process for new brands, and Cha approached it with strong confidence in the balance between scent, bottle, and price.
There were two employees at the beginning. A small team that gathered in her home to work began proposing ways to spend time alone through perfume and body care.
A Small Team Goes Global
Soon after its founding, the spread of body-care products as gifts during the pandemic became a major growth opportunity for the brand. As people spent more time at home, scented everyday products became both a way to care for oneself and a way to show concern for someone else.
Rapid growth was not all glamour, however. Cha recalls being so occupied with emails and meetings that she had no room to feel joy.
NONFICTION subsequently entered Japan in 2022. In March 2025 it opened a street-front flagship in Daikanyama, Tokyo, and in spring 2026 it established its first North American store on New York’s Lower East Side.
The Brand’s Commitments
Turning Scent into Story
NONFICTION perfumes are not made through the founder’s sensibility alone. Direction is developed together with the in-house fragrance lab and marketing team, and development proceeds with external perfumers and fragrance houses suited to the concept.
Repeated trials can sometimes take around three years to reach completion. Rest in a forest, shade at midday, warmth close to the skin, memories of flowers: the heart of development concerns not only the materials composing a scent, but the scenes and emotions it should communicate.
An Approach to Choosing Materials
The official quality policy says that perfume ingredients are carefully selected from partners around the world and that plant-derived ingredients are used. It also sets out a policy of avoiding parabens, phthalates, MIT/CMIT, and other ingredients.
NONFICTION is not, however, a brand that uses only natural perfume materials. The Grey, for example, uses Tonkitone Musk, a vegan perfume material that recreates the texture of natural musk.
Rather than determining value solely by a material’s origin, the brand chooses what suits the scent it wants to express. The same approach is evident in its collaborations with perfumers.
Dialogue with Perfumers
The brand works with perfumers of differing styles, including Maurice Roucel (in Japanese), Dominique Ropion, Barnabé Fillion, and Alex Lee.
The encounter with Roucel is particularly memorable. When they first met in France, he had already prepared a trial fragrance inspired by NONFICTION on his own initiative. It reportedly led to what would become The Beige.
Rather than communicating the brand’s direction one-way, the works also reflect how the perfumer perceives NONFICTION. Interpretations by multiple creators broaden the range of its scents.
Minimalism Without Coldness
A logo with letters arranged around a circle, deep green, speckled paper, and shapes combining circles, semicircles, and squares: NONFICTION’s initial design emerged from collaboration with a New York-based design studio.
What Cha wanted to avoid was cold minimalism consisting of little more than a fashionable typeface. Her aim was the warmth of visiting a grandmother’s home. Hospitality, familiarity, naturalness, and humility became criteria for design and store creation.
That thinking also carries through to stores with washbasins where products can actually be tried, natural light, and fresh flowers. They are designed not just as places to select a scent from a shelf, but as places to wash one’s hands, feel a texture, and pause for a moment.
The Perfume Lineup
Here we look at the principal eaux de parfum through which the brand’s development can be traced.
Scents That Shaped the Brand
The first four creations established NONFICTION’s fundamental olfactory world.
**Santal Cream** combines sandalwood, vetiver, fig, and cardamom. The calm of wood overlaps with the softness of creamy fig.
**Gentle Night** is composed of fig, white tea, suede, cedarwood, and other notes. Sweetness sits beside the quietness of wood.
**Gaiac Flower** layers amber and vanilla over a core of smoky guaiac wood and wild rose. It has not only floral radiance but also the darkness and warmth of wood.
**Forget Me Not** is a green aromatic centered on basil, pink pepper, and lemongrass. The official description depicts it as having the brightness of champagne with basil floating in it.
Later additions included **In the Shower, combining the bitterness of patchouli and bitter orange, and, expressing the quietness of a forest through hinoki, yuzu, nutmeg, and frankincense, For Rest**.
Created with Barnabé Fillion, For Rest has a name combining “forest” with “for rest.” The role NONFICTION seeks from fragrance is expressed in the name of the work itself.
Citrus as Three Memories
In the Citrus Collection, three perfumers each constructed a citrus scent from their own memories.
**Neroli Dream** is inspired by a summer Juliette Karagueuzoglou spent in Tunisia at fifteen. Through neroli, orange blossom, lily of the valley, and musk, it depicts the transparency of white flowers.
**Open Arms** is a creation by Alex Lee. It expresses a whole bitter-orange tree, including not only the fruit but also its flowers, leaves, branches, and bitter peel.
In **Simple Garden**, Domitille Michalon-Bertier combined lime, bergamot, clary sage, and cedarwood while thinking of her parents’ garden in the countryside.
Although each works with citrus, the scene changes from white flowers to the shade of a tree and a green garden. This is a collection that does not allow citrus to end at mere freshness.
Two Personas Drawn in Musk
Introduced in 2024, **The Beige and The Grey** are collaborations with Maurice Roucel. Their theme was “persona”: the faces or facets a person possesses.
The Beige is a floral musk layering orris, geranium, jasmine, and tonka bean over soft musk. The Grey, in contrast, uses cypriol, benzoin, magnolia, and musk to show a darker, more sharply defined expression.
These creations take scents close to the skin in two directions: softness and strength.
Two Perfumers, Four Flowers
The 2025 **The Flowers** collection consists of four creations by Maurice Roucel and Dominique Ropion (in Japanese).
Roucel created The Rose and Young Memories, working with roses and wildflowers. He approaches flowers through memories and emotions imprinted on the senses.
Ropion selected iris and ylang-ylang, materials he had explored for many years, to create **Iris Concrete and Bois d’Ylang**.
The Rose, for example, combines rose with the greenness of geranium and sandalwood, forming a floral woody scent that suggests not just petals but the stem as well.
Even when a flower’s name provides a shared point of entry, a different perspective awaits beyond it with each perfumer. The Flowers is a collection through which those differences can be followed in scent.
By the Way…
Turning the Smells of Memory into Art
In 2024, NONFICTION served as the scent partner for artist Koo Jeong A’s Odorama Cities at the Korean Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale.
The project gathered at least 600 “scent memories” associated with Korean cities and hometowns, developing them into olfactory experiences by sixteen perfumers and a perfume created by Dominique Ropion.
A brand that began with private time spent in a bathroom joined an art project addressing people’s memories of hometowns and cities. It was an occasion when NONFICTION’s view of scent as a medium for memory and emotion took form on a different scale.
Beyond “From South Korea”
While expressing respect for K-beauty, Cha says she does not want the brand defined solely by that term. Her aim is a brand that can cross borders and also move beyond dependence on its individual founder.
When trying NONFICTION, it is worth looking beyond images of countries or trends to consider what kind of time a fragrance brings into one’s own life. Does it shift the mood in the morning, or restore quietness at night? That question closely resembles the original idea Cha had in her bathroom.
References
- HEYPOP「어떤 거짓도 없이, 논픽션」 — https://heypop.kr/n/463/
- Marie Claire Korea「향에 담긴 시간, 논픽션 #브랜디그」 — https://www.marieclairekorea.com/lifestyle/2021/11/brandig-nonfiction/
- NONFICTION「Brand Story」 — https://int.nonfiction.com/pages/our-story
- Beauty Independent「South Korean Fragrance Brand Nonfiction Opens First North American Store In New York」 — https://www.beautyindependent.com/south-korean-fragrance-brand-nonfiction-opens-first-north-american-store-new-york/
- W Magazine「Studio Concrete Sets Out to Be the K-Pop Group Equivalent of the Art World」 — https://www.wmagazine.com/story/studio-concrete-sets-out-to-be-the-k-pop-group-equivalent-of-the-art-world
- Monocle, interview with Cha Haeyoung — https://monocle.com/business/entrepreneurialism/cha-haeyoung-interview-nonfiction/
- Tatler Asia「Nonfiction’s Cha Haeyoung on perfume as a piece of art」 — https://www.tatlerasia.com/style/beauty/cha-haeyoung-nonfiction-ceo
- NONFICTION「Quality & Promise」 — https://int.nonfiction.com/pages/quality-promise
- NONFICTION, Musk Collection and interview with Maurice Roucel — https://nonfiction.kr/special/musk.html
- NONFICTION「First Japanese Pop-Up Store Held at Isetan Shinjuku」(2022; entry into Japan and launch of official website) — https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000002.000100225.html
- NONFICTION, Gaiac Flower product page — https://nonfiction.kr/product/%EA%B0%80%EC%9D%B4%EC%95%85-%ED%94%8C%EB%9D%BC%EC%9B%8C-%EC%98%A4-%EB%93%9C-%ED%8D%BC%ED%93%B8-30ml/22/
- NONFICTION, Forget Me Not product page — https://nonfiction.kr/product/%ED%8F%AC%EA%B2%9F-%EB%AF%B8-%EB%82%AB-%EC%98%A4-%EB%93%9C-%ED%8D%BC%ED%93%B8-30ml/23/
- NONFICTION, Citrus Collection perfumer interviews — https://nonfiction.kr/campaign-single.html
- NONFICTION「Inspiration Behind the Fragrance — Two gazes at flowers」 — https://int.nonfiction.com/blogs/projects/inspiration-behind-the-fragrance-two-gazes-at-flowers
- NONFICTION, The Rose product page — https://www.nonfiction.kr/product/detail.html?product_no=636&cate_no=157&display_group=1
- NONFICTION「ODORAMA CITIES by KOO JEONG A」 — https://int.nonfiction.com/blogs/projects/odorama-cities
- NONFICTION official Japanese website (fragrance guide and product list) — https://jp.nonfiction.com/
- NONFICTION「First Japanese Street-Front Flagship Opens in Daikanyama」(2025) — https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000010.000100225.html
- NONFICTION「The Beige Eau de Parfum」 — https://jp.nonfiction.com/products/the-beige-parfum
- NONFICTION「The Grey Eau de Parfum」 — https://jp.nonfiction.com/products/the-grey-parfum
- NONFICTION「THE FLOWERS」Japanese launch release (2025) — https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000012.000100225.html
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