OUR STORY

Before we learned to hurry through the world, we noticed everything.

Lake water drying on our skin. Smoke caught in a sweater. The charged air before a storm. The way the woods sound after dark.

As children, we understood that ordinary places could hold entire worlds. A patch of trees became an unexplored wilderness. A summer night seemed energizing. The smallest discovery felt like magic.

True Hue was created to call us back to that feeling.

WHERE IT BEGAN

True Hue began with founder Griffin Overbye’s childhood beside a Minnesota lake - a place shaped by sunsets on water, tall wildflowers, taller heaps of snow, and seasons that seemed to transform everything overnight.

There was the full moon outside his window, which became Blood Moon, and the childhood belief that a witch might fly across it. Forest Fern came from building forts among the ferns and trees along the lake’s peninsula. Skinny Dipping held the freedom of teenage nights spent slipping from the dock into dark water. Woods and Stargazing carried other fragments of the same world: places explored, skies watched, and ordinary moments experienced as something enormous.

When Griffin’s parents moved out of his childhood home, that world could no longer be returned to in quite the same way. He felt displaced, caught between the person he had been and the adult he was becoming. The first True Hue fragrances became a way of preserving what remained - the atmosphere of home, reconstructed through scent and made possible to carry anywhere.

BECOMING TRUE

As Griffin began the brand in 2017, he was also navigating a period of profound personal change - stepping into adulthood, coming into his own, and learning what it meant to live more authentically. The name “True Hue” held two meanings: a commitment to cleaner, more thoughtfully made home fragrance and a belief in embracing one’s truest colors.

What began as a way of holding onto home gradually became a way of finding it again - not only as a place, but as a feeling of belonging within yourself.

That idea continues to shape everything True Hue creates. Our fragrances invite you to follow memory, rediscover wonder, and return to whatever makes you feel most alive, most at home, and most unmistakably yourself.

A WAY BACK

Scent has the strange ability to find memories we can no longer reach on our own.

One sniff can open a door: returning us to a forgotten room, a distant season, or a version of ourselves we thought we had outgrown. For a moment, we become curious again - unguarded and awake to everything around us.

True Hue creates fragrance as a way back. Not to childhood itself, but to the wonder with which we once experienced the world - and to the truest parts of ourselves we collected along the way.

Because sometimes finding your way forward begins by remembering what once felt like home.

FRAGRANCE AS ATMOSPHERE

We compose fragrances as atmospheres rather than simple arrangements of notes.

Each scent begins with a feeling, memory, or imagined world. Familiar elements are layered with something darker, stranger, or just beyond reach: warm woods touched by smoke, citrus beneath an endless night sky, flowers moving through shadows.

The result is fragrance that unfolds slowly and leaves room for your own memories to enter. Something intimate but difficult to place. A world that feels as though it has always existed - and you have only just discovered it.

Moody. Modern. Magical. This is fragrance for those who still believe the ordinary can become extraordinary.

MADE WITH INTENTION

Wonder means more when it is made responsibly.

Our home fragrances are thoughtfully developed in Minneapolis using materials selected with performance, transparency, and the world around us in mind. Our candles feature a premium soy and coconut wax blend with braided cotton wicks. Our fragrance oils are phthalate-free, and our candles, sprays, and diffusers are vegan and VOC-compliant.

From the formulas we develop to the packaging that holds them, we believe in creating with intention, embracing restraint, and choosing details designed to endure.

BELONGING IS PART OF THE STORY

True Hue is proudly LGBTQ-owned and rooted in the belief that everyone deserves the freedom to live fully and authentically.

We support organizations that foster inclusion, belonging, and a world in which more people can feel seen. For us, giving back is not separate from the brand - it is part of what the name True Hue has come to represent.

Because rediscovering your true hue is not about becoming someone new. It is about returning to what was always there.

FIND YOUR TRUE HUE

What begins as Griffin’s memory becomes something personal to each person who encounters it.

What started in a small Minneapolis apartment has grown into an independent fragrance house carried by hundreds of shops, while remaining rooted in the landscapes and memories that first inspired it.

A fragrance may carry you somewhere you have been, somewhere you have imagined, or somewhere that exists only for a moment. You may not be able to explain why it feels familiar. You only know that something inside you recognizes it.

Follow that feeling.

Make room for mystery. Notice what you once overlooked. Return to the part of yourself that still sees possibility everywhere.

Every fragrance tells a story. Find the one that feels like yours.