“Happy Nuts” was one of my first nut scents. The perfume opens with a sweet gourmand pistachio – almond – marzipan note with a milk touch. The smell comes closest to the taste of a sweet pistachio or almond cream; the real good ones you get in Italy. Not the healthy ones with 90% nuts, but the ones with at least 40% nuts and also quite a lot of sugar. Better for the figure to smell than to eat them!
There is cinnamon in the scent, and caramel. The perfume is wonderfully harmonic. To compare it with a smell from the kitchen, almond pistachio cookies fresh from the oven would be the one. The almonds dominate.
According to the BORONTOSTANDOUT website, the scent notes are:
pistachio, almond, caramel, rum, honey, vanilla, sesame, davana essence, tonka absolute, tobacco, gaïac wood, ambergris, and white musks.
Whilst I cannot identify all scent notes, they certainly make a beautiful bouquet.
The colour of the scent is beige, like blanched almonds.
It appears that BORNTOSTANDOUT recently changed the name of the fragrance – from “Happy Nuts” to simply “Nuts”. There would have been better names to change in the perfume collection. Some are quite unsubtly craving attention, which is part of the branding of BORNTOSTANDOUT. Being rebellious and non-conformist through bad language is not to everyone’s taste – but we can easily ignore it and appreciate the beauty of the perfume. “Happy Nuts” hits target better than simply “Nuts”, as it creates a friendly, warm and happy atmosphere.
Jun Lim, the Korean founder of BORNTOSTANDOUT, started collecting perfumes at the age of 15, as he is quoted in quite a few interviews you can find in the internet when googling his name and his brand. Jun Lim started to work as an investment banker first, before venturing in the perfume business in 2020. He launched his first perfumes in 2022 in Korea. The branding is a direct answer to Korean habits of conformity; Jun Lim describes himself as a bohemian and a rebel. He wants his perfumes not to be perfect, but genuine. The brand does not work with influencers and famous models. BORNTOSTANDOUT does their marketing photos always without people, only with objects demonstrating the notes and the spirit of the perfume. It is still a lot of marketing for a brand that calls itself niche.
Perfume brands from Asia are still rare. During the last years a few others (from Japan mainly) came to be known in Europe. Jun Lim and BORNTOSTANDOUT were famous very fast internationally, not being limited by the country borders of Korea.
In the beginning, the brand started with a clear colour scheme of white and red for the bottles. The scheme is still strictly used on the website. The bottles are now more diverse; there are collections in their very own, different colours. The form of the bottles always stayed the same and is said to be inspired by Korean pottery.
Jun Lim gives a clear statement on his website on sustainability, packaging, false claims, and perfumes that are not made where they are supposed to be made. He wants BORNTOSTANDOUT to be taken seriously as a Korean brand.
Master perfumer behind “Happy Nuts” is Margaux Le Paih-Guerin, the nose of many fantastic gourmand perfumes. Her gourmands are a class for themselves, but of course she also created other scents. There is a good portrait/interview of the artist on the ÇaFleureBon website. Margaux Le Paih-Guerin grew up in Brittany, France and learned perfumery from scratch. She worked for many well-known companies and today seems happy with the “Flair” team that we last encountered with Alexandre.J’s “Oriental Enigma”. It is fair that Jun Lim names the perfumers who realized his ideas.
BORNTOSTANDOUT has launched 48 perfumes since 2022 – an impressive number. It shows the drive of Jun Lim, and the wish to expand. If the brand stays a niche brand is not clear. The fragrances of BORNTOSTANDOUT that I own are gourmand scents, sometimes a bit over the top. There are wonderful perfumes among them. If the scent notes are right, you can buy them blindly and you will not be disappointed.
Over the last year Jun Lim experimented a lot with exotic fruits in his perfumes – a trend that can be observed in many brands. His “Nanatopia” made a banana scent into a nice perfume, something that often went wrong when tried by other brands.
What to expect next of BORNTOSTANDOUT? Honestly no idea – Jun Lim will certainly be extremely active and continue his expansion. Will he sell the brand, move away from Korea? We will see. What he developed in such few years is a great achievement. We customers will wait curiously for more.