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Client: Guerlain · Partner: Taein Song · Service: Penrose Audio — Davies Aguirre
Guerlain commissioned Penrose Audio to create a soundscape for the Cherry Blossom Millésime 2025 — a limited-edition fragrance celebrating the Japanese tradition of Hanami, the practice of gathering to appreciate the fleeting beauty of cherry blossoms in bloom. The scent opens with bergamot and green tea, moves through a heart of lilac, cherry blossom, and jasmine, and settles into white musk. The iconic Bee Bottle for this edition was hand-painted by South Korean artist Taein Song, adorned with blooming sakuras.
Our task was to give sound to that stillness — to find an audio language that honored both the fragrance's delicate construction and the visual intimacy of Song's artwork.
Hanami is not a spectacle. It is the act of sitting beneath blossoms, watching them fall, knowing they will not last. That sense of suspended, grateful attention became our sonic anchor. Rather than dramatic gestures, we looked for sounds that could hold still — that would let the viewer lean in rather than be swept forward.
The sound palette needed to feel organic but refined: warm enough to evoke the softness of petals, translucent enough to suggest open sky. We wanted each element to carry its own breath, so the overall texture would feel alive without ever feeling crowded.
The foundation of the piece is built on chamber strings from Ólafur Arnalds' Chamber Evolutions library — an ensemble known for its intimacy and tendency toward slow, aching movement. We drew on long, sustained passages where the strings perform quietly evolving note clusters, their internal motion barely perceptible but deeply felt. The warmth in the low-mid register — roughly 200–400 Hz — gives the piece its grounding, a sense that something rooted and real lies beneath the delicacy above.
We specified two articulations throughout: flautando — bowing very close to the fingerboard to produce a soft, flute-like tone with reduced overtone presence — and con sordino, strings muted to a subdued, slightly veiled quality. Together, these choices pull the strings away from any projection or insistence. They become suggestion rather than statement. Transitions between musical phrases use these articulations to create near-imperceptible shifts, the way one petal falls and another takes its place without announcement.
Layered against the strings, we introduced delicate chime sounds — high-frequency transients sitting above 8 kHz, carefully attenuated so they shimmer rather than pierce. Each chime was positioned and balanced to evoke filtered sunlight moving through blossoms, the kind of light that arrives in fragments. These were never used decoratively; every placement responds to something in the image.
The sound was built in close dialogue with the visual edit. As the camera moves slowly across Song's painted bottle, the strings swell in gentle correspondence — not hitting beats, but breathing with the pacing of the eye's movement. When the Bee Bottle is revealed in detail, the chimes punctuate the moment with restraint, marking significance without overstating it.
The finished piece plays as a single, unbroken gesture — approximately ninety seconds of sound that accompanies Guerlain's visual content without competing with it. The combination of flautando strings, con sordino textures, and precisely placed chimes gave the campaign a sonic identity consistent with both Guerlain's heritage and the spirit of Hanami itself: careful, present, and quietly moved.
Working within Guerlain's world — where craft, restraint, and cultural specificity are not aspirational but foundational — was a reminder of what sound design can be when it serves something larger than itself.
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