Stop Hiding the Colours: On Expression, Synaesthesia, and Spirits Education

I wasn't expecting a song from an animated K-Pop film to stop me in my tracks. But here we are.

If you haven't seen KPop Demon Hunters on Netflix yet, here's what you need to know. Huntrix are a fictional K-Pop girl group who also, quietly, hunt demons. Their leader Rumi is half-demon herself, born to a demon hunter mother and a demon father, and she carries that heritage literally on her skin. Golden patterns shift and move across her arms. She hides them. Always. A jacket on stage, careful angles, constant vigilance, because in the world she lives in, those markings make her the very thing she's been trained to destroy.

The patterns aren't just physical. They're tied to Gwi-Ma, the demon ruler who is also the embodiment of internalized shame. The more Rumi suppresses who she is, the more the patterns consume her from the inside.

The turning point is not quiet. It's brutal. During a live performance, Rumi is betrayed and exposed in front of everyone. Demons impersonating her bandmates tear her jacket off on stage, forcing her markings into full view. She loses control, shatters the lights with her voice, and flees. When the real Mira and Zoey find her backstage, there is nowhere left to hide.

And then they choose her anyway.

That's the moment the song What It Sounds Like is building towards. The question one of the group asks, why she ever covered up the colours stuck inside her head, isn't rhetorical. It's the most important question in the film. And the answer the song arrives at is that hiding them was never protection. It was just a slower kind of damage.

I've been asking myself a version of that question for most of my adult life.

Synaesthesia means that when I taste a spirit, I don't just taste it. I see it. Flavour becomes colour, texture becomes shape, and a really remarkable whisky can unfold into something close to a landscape. Vivid, layered, and entirely mine. It's the most natural thing in the world to me, and for a long time it was also the thing I felt most self-conscious about mentioning in professional settings.

The whisky industry has a particular kind of gravity. There are right answers and wrong answers, approved vocabularies, and quietly enforced hierarchies. Walking into that space as someone whose entire sensory experience is, by most standards, unusual and then trying to build a business on it felt like showing up with your patterns on full display when everyone else had carefully kept theirs hidden.

Vantage Creative exists because I stopped hiding them.

The whole philosophy behind what we do is rooted in the idea that there is no wrong way to experience a spirit. No correct tasting note. No vocabulary you need to earn before you're allowed an opinion. The goal has always been to create a space where people can explore freely, where their version of the experience is the valid one, full stop.

Finding a community of people who were genuinely curious rather than dismissive changed everything. People who wanted to know what a Speyside looks like when it turns gold at the edges, or why a smoky Islay opens dark and violet before it softens. That gave me the confidence to stop framing my synaesthesia as a quirk to apologise for and start treating it as the foundation of something genuinely useful.

Rumi's patterns weren't a flaw in need of correction. They were the most honest thing about her. She just needed people around her who could see that.

By the end of the film, Huntrix aren't just surviving. They're fearless and undefined. They've stopped trying to fit themselves into a shape that was never built for them. The song closes on something hard-won: truth after all this time, voices combined, darkness meeting light.

That's the Vantage Creative mission too. Not to tell people what to think or feel when they're tasting, but to hand them the space to find out for themselves.

Stop hiding the colours. Let the jagged edges meet the light.

Your senses are not a beginner's approximation of the correct answer. They're the correct answer. Because they're yours.

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If that sounds like an experience worth having, Vantage Creative offers private and group tastings across Speyside and beyond. No correct answers. No gatekeeping. Just your senses, your discovery.

Explore what we do at vantagecreativescot.co.uk

Your senses. Your discovery.