Tombstone Sing At My Funeral Review

Tombstone Sing At My Funeral 

I adore that there are people out there in the world, contemplating their own mortality, through the medium of perfume. It provides me with solace when I’m sitting out late at night, exhausted from the day, looking up at the blackness of the sky and pondering something similar. And it’s this idea of a unifying, unspoken and unfiltered human connection that is almost certainly the entire point of the Tombstone house. In narrower terms, Tombstone is an olfactory art project from China. A collection of five perfumed musings on death, permanence and legacy called things like Sweet Coffin, 3 Feet 5 and No Need To Come By. In the brand’s own words they “hope to encourage people to move beyond the fear of death and reclaim the narrative of defining life and defining death”, because, well… death and dying is still the final taboo, isn’t it? Certainly, here in Britain, we don’t really openly discuss it, certainly not in any detail. Grief here is still very much a private thing, to be dealt with in one’s own time, away from judgement or contradiction.

Perfumer Yenchi Lin, whose 204-perfume Grandma’s Closet was a finalist in the Artisan Category at the 2025 edition of the Art & Olfaction Awards.

Perhaps there is a personal experience of something similar at the heart of Tombstone’s Sing At My Funeral? It might be a part of why Taiwanese perfumer Yenchi Lin saw such a temporal brief and chose to pour light and lift into a fragrant musing on her own mortality. Is she trying to contradict the sheer weight of such emotion with a choral, comforting floral softness? Or is the perfume intended a lot more literally, as a bottling of that overpowering aroma of pungent funeral bouquets arranged neatly on a heavy sideboard in some sterile, wood paneled room? The name of the perfume would suggest that both things can be true at once and her mélange of mint, honeyed florals, ashen jasmine and darkly somber smelling woods manages to feel both vibrant and moody.

There’s a loaded, looming feeling to the opening of Sing At My Funeral as a rush of stone and nutty vetiver coalesce to represent the spectre of turned ground and a coffin respectively. It’s rather arresting at first, like a shock of brutal, unexpected finality, but within that damp and visceral opening there’s a bolt of light contained within it – a luminous, non-specific kind of white floralcy that swells and pervades for the rest of the wear. I imagine Lin intending this to be the collective soothing of the chorus of voices as they tackle the songs being sung in celebration of her remembrance.

 Tombstone Sing At My Funeral Photo by Oli

I described the perfume in more conversational shorthand as smelling like “smoking cigarettes in a crypt with someone who is wearing ckOne” because Tombstone’s Sing At My Funeral is somewhat dark, mineral and brooding but it also has a sheer and clarified lightness  quality to it. Perhaps more of the perfume’s outwardly evocative aspects are actually drawn from Tombstone’s world as a whole. After all, there is an emotional intensity to all of it; the slab-like inverted bottles, the headstone style boxes and the loaded perfume names. It’s all very specific and tailored to make the point that we should “celebrate the beauty and intensity of being human” and I do wonder, without all that, without the name, would this fragrance have proved to be so evocative? I’m sure the smell still would have moved me, but would it have made me chase the brand across three separate trade shows (Paris Perfume Week, Niche Show & Esxence) to track down just a sample of it if it was called something different? I’m asking a lot of questions here, I only have inferences. Yenchi Lin hasn’t just imagined the olfactory reality of her own death, she’s created a thoughtful, haunting fragrance that explores the possibility of positivity when people are presented with her own passing. So perhaps Tombstone’s Sing At My Funeral should be thought of more as a celebration of life.  An expulsion of collective relief that’s very much intended to both confound and comfort us.

Notes: Mint, Honey, Neroli, Jasmine, Lily of Valley, Orris, Cedarwood, Vetiver, Amber

Disclaimer: A sample of Sing At My Funeral was acquired at Esxence. A bottle was sent by the brand for review, subsequently. Opinions solely my own

 – Oli Marlow, Senior Editor

All photos courtesy of Tombstone unless otherwise noted.

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