No artist creates in isolation – but Jouissance founder Cherry Cheng is particularly passionate about celebrating her influences. Her fragrance house, which she founded during the pandemic in 2022, translates female-authored erotic literature and feminist theory into scent; her citrus-forward 2025 fragrance En Plein Air is inspired by French literary luminary Catherine Millet. Its description on the Jouissance website advises that customers “Wear En Plein Air if you want to smell like an unassuming art critic on her way to an orgy”.
Last month, Cheng unveiled her new fragrance, and this time it’s inspired by one of her favourite places in London: La Camionera. Taking inspiration from a place, instead of a person or prose, might feel like a leap. But for Cheng, this inclusive lesbian Hackney bar, known as a sanctuary for London’s FLINTA community (female, lesbian, intersex, non-binary, trans and agender) lives very comfortably in the sensual and literary world of Jouissance.
“I’d wanted to collaborate with La Camionera for a long time,” Cheng tells Broadsheet. “It’s become such an important institution within London’s creative community, and it’s one of those rare places where so many personal stories overlap. Friends have celebrated birthdays and fallen in love there, and spent endless evenings talking over drinks. Beyond that, they regularly host book clubs, readings and sexy film nights, so it already felt deeply aligned with the cultural world of Jouissance.”
Cheng approached La Camionera’s owners Alex Loveless and Clara Solis, and found that they were “immediately enthusiastic. After the initial discussion, it became clear that the fragrance should be an olfactory of La Camionera – the scent of a sexy night out at the bar itself. That shared ambition made the collaboration feel incredibly natural from the outset”.
The question became: how do you bottle the scent of a night out? For Cheng, it began with the transportive nature of La Camionera. Named after the Spanish slang word for butch lesbians (it translates to “female truck driver”), the diminutive space in a Homerton back street blends a clean-cut slickness with warmth and imperfection. The brushed aluminum bar stands in contrast with rough plaster walls, coloured tiles, sensual artworks, soft lighting and vintage furniture.
“Every time I walk in, I’m struck by the combination of that warm red glow and the incense that’s always quietly burning in the background. There’s something hazy, intimate and almost cinematic about it that immediately transports you,” Cheng says.
Cheng, Loveless and Solis agreed that jasmine felt right as the heart of the fragrance (“It’s one of perfumery’s most seductive materials: luminous and narcotic, but with these leathery, animalic facets,” Cheng says). “Around that, I built layers of citrus, warm spices and woods to evoke the feeling of a night that’s only just getting started – or perhaps one that you don’t want to end.”
The late addition of marzipan “completely transformed” the composition and became one of its defining features. “It softened the spices, wrapped itself around the jasmine and made everything feel warmer, richer and more developing,” Cheng says.
The result is a complex fragrance with layers that reveal themselves in time: an initial hit of spice, from top notes of nutmeg and cinnamon, give way to the sweetness of vanilla and tonka, as well as warmth from base layers of sandalwood and musk. The jasmine, as the perfume’s description suggests, is inspired by La Camionera’s courtyard: “In the garden, a tiny patch of eternal sapphic summer, cloaked in the heady scent of night-blooming jasmine”.
“I feel like we’re living in a moment where people are craving romance, intimacy and escapism – scents that envelop you like a warm embrace,” Cheng says. “It’s been gratifying to see people recognise those feelings in the fragrance.”
La Camionera is available on the Jouissance website.
