Standards do not have a passport.

There is an assumption in this country, quiet and lazy, about where good things are allowed to come from. It is rarely said out loud. It shows up as a small hesitation when a price is read next to a Pakistani name, and as the relief people feel when the same price sits next to a French one.

We decline it.

GENSŌ is an extrait de parfum, the most concentrated form a fragrance is made in. It was composed here, from scratch, and it is not an impression of anything. Two hundred bottles exist. Each one is numbered and marked by hand, one at a time, and checked before it leaves.

The materials are not from here, and we are not going to be coy about that. The oils come from France, from Spain, from Saudi Arabia. That is where the best of them are traded and it is where serious houses everywhere buy them, including the ones whose names you would accept without a second thought. Nobody composes from things that grow outside their own window. What is ours is the judgement: which materials, in what proportion, for a climate that runs past forty degrees.

What is made here is the rest of it. The blending. The filling. The numbering, by hand, one bottle at a time. The leather patch on the box, cut and seated by hand, from a tannery in Kasur, an hour south of the room where the bottles are filled. The box itself. Everything that can honestly be made in this country is made in it, and we would rather tell you exactly which parts than let you assume.

None of that is offered as an excuse for the price. It is the reason for it.

A house is not made serious by where it is registered. It is made serious by what it refuses. We refused to make more than two hundred, because the number is the only honest way to say how much attention each one can be given. We refused to make it lighter, because an extrait asks to be worn once and carried rather than topped up through the day. We refused to pay anyone for an opinion, which costs us reach and buys us the only thing worth having, which is that when somebody praises it you know nobody paid them.

And we refused to pretend it was made somewhere else. That refusal is the expensive one. It would have been easier to be vague about the country and let people assume, and a good deal of what is sold here does exactly that. But a fragrance that has to hide where it was made is telling you something about how it was made.

The hands that built GENSŌ work to tolerances most ateliers would recognise and some would envy. Gold line work registered in fractions of a millimetre. Every number applied by hand. Somewhere in the line work on your bottle there is a small unevenness, which is the proof of a hand, and a machine would have cleaned it off. We paid extra to keep it.

Two hundred people will own a number. When the last one is claimed the series closes, because that is what an edition means.

Standards do not have a passport. Ours are in Lahore, in the open, under our own name.