Meet the Palette: The Three Naturals LOSiam Discovery Kits

Open the LOSiam catalogue for the first time and the problem isn't a lack of interest. It's the size of the room. Twenty-some absolutes, CO2 extracts and concretes, most of them from materials that don't show up anywhere else: reclaimed teak sawdust, fermented Assam tea, upcycled tangerine peel, roasted litsea fruit. Ordering a single 10g sample of a material you've never smelled, sourced from a country most perfumers have never bought from directly, is a real commitment. Which one do you start with?

That question is what the three Discovery Kits are built to answer. Starting 1 October 2026, LOSiam is officially launching Kit Lanna, Kit Jungle and Kit Thai Gourmand: three collections, each gathering five pure absolutes around a single olfactory family, in 2g amber bottles, at a price that costs less than ordering the same five materials separately.

A different kind of kit

Search "perfumery discovery kit" and most of what comes back wasn't built for a working perfumer. We looked at what else exists before building ours, and the gap was clear. The established French houses, Biolandes and Albert Vieille, between them offering several hundred raw materials and decades of pedigree, don't sell any kind of curated sampling format at all: it's catalogue in, volume order out. Eden Botanicals comes closer, with single materials available as 1ml samples ahead of a bulk order, but there's no curated journey between them: you still have to build your own path through the catalogue, one material at a time. The only outfit actually selling "kits" in the literal sense is Perfumer's Apprentice, and its three bundles (priced $90 to $149) are built for hobbyists and students: synthetic aroma bases pre-diluted to working strength, bundled with pipettes, dilution oil and tutorials, positioned explicitly as a way to "create your own perfume" from scratch.

None of that is what a working perfumer needs when the goal is simply to evaluate a rare natural material fast, at real concentration, before deciding whether to order it in bulk. So the category LOSiam is stepping into, a curated, single-origin, professional-strength sampling format, doesn't really have an occupant yet. That's not a marketing line; it's what a straight comparison of what's actually on the market shows.

Three collections, three scenes

Each kit isn't five unrelated samples thrown in a box together. It's a single scene, told through five materials that belong in it.

Kit Lanna, "Roots, Dust & Time," is one evening in an old teak house in Northern Thailand. Reclaimed teak sawdust, the kind that usually gets burned the moment a plank is cut, sits alongside a jar of Ya Dong, the roots-and-bark liquor rural households across Thailand still infuse at home. Dried Ma Khaen pepper, kept the only way hill families across Nan, Chiang Rai, Mae Hong Son and Chiang Mai know how, sits next to fermented Miang tea, a living Northern Thai and Shan practice that also happens to be the single most expensive material in our entire catalogue. Cured Virginia tobacco, flue-cured and aged slow by Lanna growers, closes the scene. 4,300 THB.

Kit Jungle, "Citrus, Green & Bright," is a morning walk in the hills above Chiang Mai. Fresh, still-green Ma Khaen berries, aldehydic and violet-leaf bright rather than dried and warm, open the walk. Roasted Ta Krai Ton fruit, a pretreatment villagers developed themselves, adds something smoky under the citrus. Lemon Marigold, extracted from the actual flowering plant that grows wild around the tea plantations here rather than the sharper species most of the industry uses, brings a softer, more naturalistic floral edge. Tangerine Upcycled, the furocoumarin-free, saline-citrus absolute, sits alongside Chalood, whose bark anchors generations of Lanna incense and herbal tradition. 2,500 THB.

Kit Thai Gourmand, "Toasted, Roasted & Sweet," is a morning market in Chiang Mai. Fresh-cut Pandan folds into a pot of rice the way Thai households have used it for generations, green, velvety, closer to basmati and fresh-popped corn than to a synthetic "coconut rice" accord. Coconut flesh toasts slowly into street-market candy, creamy and buttery with a rum-and-caramel depth. High-altitude Chiang Mai Arabica, grown and processed anaerobically by the same farmers supplying the city's specialty coffee shops, pours dark chocolate and dried fruit over a woody base. Upcycled Makiang, pulled from fruit-stall pulp that would otherwise be discarded, and the same Chalood bark from Kit Jungle, leaning here toward almond, tonka and gingerbread instead of incense, close the set. 3,000 THB.

What's actually in the box

Five 2g amber bottles per kit. Real absolutes, not diluted teaching bases: this is the same concentration we sell in our standard 10g orders, just measured out at sample scale. Nothing is pre-mixed or pre-diluted for you. Instead, every bottle ships with a leaflet that gives the exact dilution formula for olfactory evaluation: 2g of absolute in 8g of pure alcohol makes a 20% solution, ready to run on a blotter. There's nothing to guess and nothing to wait on before you start working with the material.

Each kit costs less than ordering the same five materials separately at our standard sample pricing. And if a material earns its place in a formula, the path forward is the same one we use for every material in our catalogue: our standard working order starts at 10g.

What LOSiam actually did here

None of what's in these kits started with us. We didn't invent the practice of infusing Ya Dong at home, or the incense tradition behind Chalood bark, or the way Northern Thai households have cooked with Pandan for generations. What we did was go find the people already doing it, sourcing directly from the farm, the sawmill, the tea grower, the coffee farm at altitude, and build a way for a perfumer who will never visit any of these places to hold the material on a blotter. Several of these materials, the reclaimed teak sawdust, the upcycled tangerine peel and Makiang pulp, the fermented Miang tea, had never been captured as an absolute before we extracted them. That's the same thing we can say for the rest of our catalogue, but it's worth saying again here: this is upcycling and green chemistry, not mass production, and it's the reason none of it exists anywhere else.

It's also, as far as we can tell from a straight look at the market, the reason no other supplier currently sells anything quite like these three kits. The big houses have no discovery format at all. The one real competitor selling "kits" is building for students, with synthetic bases and dilution equipment included. A curated set of pure, single-origin absolutes, built around a real olfactory family, priced for a first genuine evaluation, is a category we appear to have to ourselves for now.

At a glance

Each set is five 2g amber bottles of pure absolute, with the dilution formula for blotter evaluation printed on the leaflet inside.

How to get one

All three Discovery Kits are available from 1 October 2026. Tell us which collection matches what you're working on, or which one you're simply curious about, and we'll get it to you. Get in touch or write to us directly at info@losiam.com. If a material in one of these kits ends up earning a place in your formula, our standard working order starts at 10g.

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