Monkeyflower is the ninth fragrance in the Stora Skuggan universe. Despite the brand’s reputation for mythology and surrealism, this time they anchored the fantasy in something real: a plant once widely grown in Victorian England for its musk scent, the Musk Monkeyflower (Erythranthe moschata). Over time, the flower’s fragrance weakened, and by the early twentieth century, even plants in cultivation and some wild populations had largely lost the scent. To this day the precise cause remains uncertain. The flower remained, but the fragrance once central to its identity no longer spoke.
This mystery became the seed of Stora Skuggan’s depiction. It doesn’t attempt to recreate the flower’s original scent; it imagines forward from the absence. And in my view, that act of creative reclamation, when considered within a climate of cultural and identity-based erasure shaped by resurgent authoritarianism, functions as a counterpoint to the regime-driven narrowing of what a society is allowed to see, imagine or become.
This is my reading, shaped by the conditions of erasure that structure contemporary trans and queer life. Monkeyflower, as far as I know, was not designed with this weight in mind. I found this meaning in it. What began as a botanical curiosity became, for me, a way of thinking about disappearance, reclamation and the politics of presence. And once I started reading it this way, the monkeyflower’s own vanishing became impossible to see as merely botanical. Perfume has always been a mirror to its time, reflecting the pressures, omissions and desires of the moment in which it is made. The monkeyflower’s disappearance, in that light, stops being an isolated quirk of horticulture and becomes part of a larger truth: that eras leave traces in scent as much as in policy.
The disappearance of the monkeyflower’s scent is an ecological oddity, yet its symbolism reflects a broader, tragic pattern: things can vanish quietly long before anyone thinks to protect them. The flower’s fading was driven by circumstance, genetic drift or environmental change, but in the cultural sphere, disappearance is rarely passive. It’s strategic and shaped by intent.
Across the world, we are living through a period of active erasure, targeting stories, identities and forms of expression that widen a society’s imaginative and moral range. We see this daily: books removed from shelves and curricula, with the American Library Association recording the highest number of attempted bans in its history, disproportionately targeting LGBTQ+ and BIPOC authors. This consolidation of narrative control also extends to art censored or politically constrained, such as Arts Council England’s 2023 funding cuts that disproportionately affected contemporary and community arts in service of “cultural nationalism.”
None of these patterns are accidental. They target stories, identities and forms of expression that expand the cultural field of possibility. Books that widen perspective. Art that challenges authority. Identities that resist binary categorisation. Histories that complicate national myths. Communities that insist on being heard.
And for trans and queer people, the stakes are even sharper. Legislation across the US and UK has begun to restrict access to healthcare, public recognition and institutional support, shifting from regulation toward something closer to administrative disappearance: the slow, procedural removal of legal and social presence. Identification documents, medical pathways, community spaces are narrowed or dismantled in ways that make a population less visible, less supported, less possible.
Authoritarianism, subtle or overt, depends on narrowing possibilities. Anything that expands the field becomes a threat. And so it is removed, rewritten, defunded or made invisible.
Seen through this lens, Stora Skuggan’s rendering of the monkeyflower’s vanished scent becomes a small-scale echo of this wider phenomenon but with one crucial distinction. The flower’s disappearance was not driven by ideology: its scent faded through ecological chance, not cultural intent. Nature can subtract without malice. Cultural disappearance does not work this way.
When books are pulled, when curricula are rewritten, when identities are legislated out of public life, the loss is not passive. It is engineered: the result of policy and deliberate narrative control.
Monkeyflower isn’t an attempt to recover a lost fragrance. It doesn’t claim to resurrect the botanical musk that vanished from the historical record. Instead, it imagines forward.
In my reading, Stora Skuggan takes the blank space left by the monkeyflower’s lost scent and treats it not as an end point, but as raw material. In a landscape where disappearance is weaponised, this gesture becomes a form of reclamation: rebuilding from what was taken, disrupted or allowed to collapse. This is not a dalliance into nostalgia. It is creative resistance.
In that imaginative space, several gestures become possible:
Reclaiming the disappeared:
A way of restoring presence where absence has taken hold, not by reconstructing the past but by asserting a new form of existence.
Invention where evidence is gone:
A refusal to accept that loss creates silence. When the historical record fractures, imagination becomes a legitimate mode of restoration.
Beauty rebuilt from ruins:
Transforming what could have remained a footnote in botanical history into a site of artistic potential.
Art as resistance:
In a climate where erasure is structural, creating a narrative around what has vanished becomes a counter-movement.
Fantasy as fidelity:
Remaining faithful not to what monkeyflower once was, but to what it can mean: an emblem of ephemeral beauty rearticulated through contemporary sensibility.
For me, perfume here becomes a medium not for replication but for response. In that light, Monkeyflower embodies a refusal to let the disappeared remain unspoken. It asserts the right to imagine where documentation ends, turning absence into possibility.
In doing so, it reframes perfumery itself: not as an archival practice, but as a living, imaginative act that can push back against cultural amnesia.
Perfumery is often framed through the language of naturalism. This reliance on natural metaphors creates a quiet erasure of the synthetics, accords and engineered structures that form the invisible backbone of modern scent.
In my view, Monkeyflower refuses that illusion. Instead of pretending to recreate a “lost” natural smell, it leans fully into artifice. Since the flower’s original musk is gone, there is no natural reference point left to imitate. The perfume doesn’t attempt realism; it treats this profound absence as creative permission.
By building an entirely imagined scent-space, Monkeyflower reveals what perfumery truly is: not the replication of nature, but the construction of experience. In this essential sense, its artifice becomes a form of honesty. It refuses the fiction that scent is a catalogue of natural smells, embracing the synthetic and the invented not as deception, but as fidelity to the truth of the medium. Where naturalism would collapse under the weight of a missing reference, artifice becomes the only honest path to reclamation. The real work of perfumery lies not in imitation but in imagination.
For those whose histories or identities have been pushed to the margins, disappearance is not an abstract concept. It’s structural. It’s familiar. It’s the quiet lesson the world tries to teach: that some stories matter less, that some identities are optional, that some lives can be edited out without consequence. When you’ve lived inside that dynamic, reclamation becomes necessary.
Acts of remembering, whether through archives, art or scent, shift from aesthetic choices to forms of resistance. They push back against the suggestion that absence is inevitable, or that erasure is somehow natural. They assert that what was removed can be restored, reimagined or rebuilt in new forms.
This is the deeper resonance Monkeyflower carries for me. It isn’t simply an invented floral accord. It’s a gesture that acknowledges how fragile presence can be, and how powerful it is to create visibility where invisibility has taken hold.
To rebuild a fragrance for a flower that no longer has one is to refuse the logic of erasure. To insist that what was lost is still worthy of expression.
For those living through climates where identity, history and culture are constrained, this kind of imaginative reclamation feels less like fantasy and more like fidelity. It’s a commitment to what should have remained visible, and a refusal to accept the silence imposed by others.
Perfume, in this light, becomes a form of forward-looking memory: a way of refusing disappearance by giving the vanished a new point of entry into the world. Monkeyflower doesn’t resurrect what once was; it protects the possibility of what can still be. Not nostalgia, but insistence. Not replication, but presence reclaimed.
Monkeyflower is a work that demonstrates the deeper power of perfume that only artifice can achieve: the re-entry of something lost, carried into the world through imagination that makes myths tangible, transforms the vanished into the visible and turns an ecological anomaly into a piece of living culture.
Absence shapes the world more often than we admit. Flowers lose their fragrances. Stories are removed from shelves. Cultures are thinned into symbols. Identities are rewritten and hollowed out. Erasure is rarely dramatic; more often it is administrative, cumulative, quiet enough that people call it inevitable.
But nothing about disappearance is neutral, and nothing about reclamation is small. Absence can be answered with creation. Art can hold space when records fail. Beauty can resist even when the structures around it prefer silence.
In a climate marked by cultural and identity-based erasure, that insistence matters. Reimagining becomes a form of remembering. Artifice becomes a kind of truth. And beauty becomes, quietly, unmistakably, a form of staying alive.