Aesop’s Above Us, Steorra: A Scent That Thinks in Light.

Aesop’s new fragrance, Above Us, Steorra, doesn’t so much arrive as descend – like a celestial visitor that’s already halfway through burning itself out. It’s an amber fragrance by definition, but one that behaves like a paradox: bright yet shadowed, sharp yet slow, a study in what happens when heat learns to glow rather than burn.

Steorra takes its name from Old English for “stars,” which feels fitting for a perfume that treats illumination as a moral condition. The composition reads like a constellation mapped in scent: cardamom as the first spark, frankincense as gravity, labdanum and vanilla as the warm afterglow of cosmic dust. There’s pepper, a whisper of cumin, a phantom sweetness that never fully declares itself – the olfactory equivalent of watching a fire from too far away to feel its warmth.

Somewhere between starlight and skin - where spice learns to glow.

While many amber fragrances revel in nostalgia, this one looks upward, not inward. It doesn’t hug you with caramelised comfort; it hovers, like the strange stillness between thunder and its echo. The texture is architectural rather than ornamental – layers of spice and resin assembled with the kind of precision that borders on obsessive. You don’t so much wear it as orbit it, letting it dictate your temperature.

It’s also, unmistakably, Aesopian: philosophical, contrarian, quietly amused at its own seriousness. The brand has long treated scent as an essay medium – a way to write ideas directly onto the skin. Steorra continues that legacy, posing its own hypothesis: that beauty requires dissonance. That something can shimmer and unsettle at the same time. The amber here isn’t fossilised resin; it’s a theory of warmth made fragrant, a story about what happens when a star mistakes curiosity for courage.

And then there’s the texture of the dry-down – all vanilla dust and resin smoke, somewhere between candlelight and static electricity. It feels alive but aloof, like a conversation you weren’t meant to overhear. This is amber for the postmodern age: less temple, more observatory. It makes you think about time – how light travels, how scent lingers, how both are forms of memory in motion.

It’s tempting to see Steorra as an outlier among Aesop’s growing cosmic canon – where Hwyl was contemplative and Eidesis mythological, Steorra feels more like speculative fiction. A scent that imagines the future of amber, if amber were discovered on Mars.

Ultimately, Above Us, Steorra smells like an act of trust: in strangeness, in stillness, in the idea that not every kind of beauty needs to make sense. It asks nothing of you except patience – and perhaps a moment of quiet awe. After all, catching a shooting star is impossible, but following its trail? That’s how legends, and perfumes, begin.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of AESOP.