Cherry Cheng

About

Cherry Cheng is the founder and creative director of the London fragrance house Jouissance, and she has recently begun composing perfumes herself. She came to scent from the art world: she studied art business at Sotheby's Institute of Art and contemporary art theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and worked at the art advisory Gurr Johns before turning to perfume.

She began learning perfumery at the start of the pandemic, then studied at the Grasse Institute of Perfumery, and in 2024 became the first private student of the French perfumer Antoine Lie. She says she would not yet call herself a perfumer, even after three years of training, and the record follows her own wording: she is credited as perfumer on one fragrance only.

That fragrance is La Camionera, released in 2026 as a collaboration with a London lesbian bar and cafe. Cheng developed it in an ongoing dialogue with the bar's owners, and the brand lists her as its perfumer. The first collection, En Plein Air, La Bague d'O and Les Cahiers Secrets, was composed by outside perfumers named on the brand's product pages, with Cheng as creative director who chose the source books and the historical references.

She also teaches, and has run workshops that show beginners how to build a simple rose accord from synthetic materials.

Her approach treats perfume as a literary and sensory medium. The Jouissance brief draws on women's writing, desire and complicated inner lives, using aldehydes, musks and animalic notes in vintage-style compositions rather than clean, unobtrusive ones.