The first cat I met was Oswaldo. His owner said he was gay and I took her at her word. He didn't take to me initially. Admittedly, most people don't take to me either. I respected him as he chased lizards around and lounged on our stone windowsill in the shade. We eventually warmed up to each other and left on good terms.

The second was Raja, a sweet and very old lady. She was slow and hard of hearing. She demanded to be let in and water served to her. As it was during a heatwave and she rightfully owned the house and garden, we dutifully obeyed and let her in and produced a small bowl of water for her. She looked like Don Quixote a bit with a large mustache and carried herself in a regal manner. 

The last cat that I met on vacation is Nuit Feline by the Merchant of Venice (MoV). This 2024 perfume created by Givaudan perfumer, Nanako Ogi, is part of MoV's Murano Art series which features opaque black bottles reminiscent of the Don Giovanni mask on the cover art of the movie, Amadeus (Cover Art by Peter Sis). Each perfume in this collection features a Murano-made glass medallion to set each of them apart. Did I want to mix up all these medallions on the testers? Yes I did.

Though I had never smelled this brand before, I had heard ample talk against it or worse, a shoulder-shrugging ambivalence, the killer of any brand publicity. These warnings ultimately kept me from sampling them in the states or seeking them out when abroad. When in the heart of Venice, though, I happened upon one of their apothecary-type shops in the Canneregio neighborhood. Most were not really my style or were overly brash and sweet, chasing modern fragrance trends, but Nuit Feline was different. It didn't scream. The website copy calls it a "soft amber" and this isn't far off the mark. The salesperson said that this was one of their least popular releases and I can definitely see why. Nuit Feline has two things working against it. First, it was this skin scent quality that would put off most of the high-toned rayon-dressed vacation ladies, frumpy panama hat-wearing men, and the young projection princes that clomped up and down the stone bridges and narrow streets. Second, it had a noticeable dose of what feels like real oud (hinting at Hindi or Laotian) that gave it an animalic almost lanolin touch. If not real oud, then it was a skillfully done accord, a rare occurrence as most chase the magic marker facet of oud (Sri Lanka) or just ditch trying altogether and call it a sweet ambery day.

If I sampled this perfume at home, I'm not sure Nuit Feline would have made any big ripples. It's funny how setting, mood, and context affect fragrance perception. Maybe I was simply wearing my big dumb vacation panama hat on the inside. What really drew me to this particular fragrance on the spot was that it reminded me of my previous four day stay in Solferino (in Lombardy, two hours east of Venice, south of Lake Garda). My first day there, I noticed that the town had a subtly sweet, woody smell with a touch of distant cow patty in the air. Nuit Feline provided me with an instant postcard. It took me back to an exact moment sitting in a pizzaria down the street having a Birra Rossa after a long drive and an even longer sleepless flight. Throughout the trip, I took notes (I called them "Scented Postcards" in my notebook) about the smells of different places and moments on vacation. These analog notes were nice ways to stop, slow down, and better yet, attempt to fix them in my memory. This particular liquid postcard of Solferino was a perfect way to smell such a close approximation before I got home and tried to recapture these fleeting smell memories myself.

After getting to know Nuit Feline a bit more, it's become primarily a dusty and spicy soft amber. I'm a bit of a sucker for a really well-done nutmeg. If overdosed, this material can be petrol-like, but here is perfectly integrated with a touch of semi-sweet amber. Paired with other spices like clove, vanillic nutmeg perfumes can head into Christmas dessert territory, but Nuit Feline holds back the seasonal associations. 

Nutmeg is usually the reserve of bland men's designer fragrances. In fact, the notes on their website: pink pepper, elemi, cypriol, ginger, frankincense, read like the structure of so many designer woody resinous perfumes. Perhaps, Nuit  Feline's closest relative is Amouage's Honour Man with its characteristic rich nutmeg-spiced frankincense overlaid on a light masculine fresh woody structure (i.e. some traces of the classic "freshifier" material, dihydromyrcenol). It also prominently hints at the spicy woody incenses of Michel Almairac (Bentley for Men Absolute, Gucci Pour Homme, and Parle Moi de Parfum's Papyrus Oud 71) in its nutmeg and vanillic incense feel. More distantly, Nuit Feline softly looks to other spicier woody perfumes like Scorpio Rising by Eris and Tiger Bright by Anjali. These both employ the rubbery cypriol and here in Nuit Feline probably helps to push out that oud impression. It never approaches the rubberiness of these two. It's also a distant spiced light ambery cousin of Mx by Eris and Korrigan by Lubin, but feels a little more grounded as these two feel as if the amber is floating around you.

Overall, Merchant of Venice's perfumes reminded me of the feel of "old niche" and had a distinct 2010s flair to them (esp. Craquele which I also sampled). They instantly took me back to the first time I smelled Amouage with their dense and resinous textures that bore no resemblance to the Calone-washed blues and the hissy hairspray designer perfumes that I was accustomed to. Whether I liked every one of them or not, the epics, interludes, the jubilations, the honours, the figments, the fates, the journeys, and the lyrics, they all signaled "niche" to me, even in their cheesy outdated binary-paired concepts. Other reviewers might call this "smelling expensive," and a younger self would've probably agreed. Not only were they out of my price range (still kinda are), but they had a refined creativity and touch of weirdness, a balance that I still appreciate. Amouage weren't the type of indie avant-garde scents that had just started to multiply at the time, but they were different in my newbie perfume brain. I think their focus on frankincense was a major reason for my interest. I was impressed with how they could bend and shift this material in so many interesting directions. I want to go back to my 2015 self and tell him that in 11 years, you'll be making cookies with Green Hojari Frankincense.

MoV struck a nostalgic nerve, but it also made me question whether I would like Amouage if the brand launched today with the old lineup. I think I've moved on from this style of perfumery, though the discontinued Fate Man still has my weird immortelle/cumin-drenched heart. It's strange that this vivid nostalgic association granted MoV a pass in my usually hypercritical (sometimes unfairly) fragrance mind. Maybe the bar was set so low that MoV easily stepped over it while holding Givaudan's hand. The concepts of the fragrances seemed extraordinarily weak given the rich Venetian source material. While the city was an impossible-to-miss center of trade in the middle ages, rich in art and architecture, the brand fails to exploit this to its fullest potential. Ultimately, it felt like a missed opportunity especially for a touch more brand storytelling. Like Amouage these days, they seem to be skating on a vague sense of opulence and luxury. [Edit: just this week, I saw that Celice Becker is creating MoV's new fragrance and it does indeed have some type of concept or story. I'm ready to eat my words. I also saw Amouage's Gowé incident which made me happy to leave this brand back in 2015].

Despite my affection for Feline Noir and its vivid postcard-like effect, I don't think I would seek out Merchant of Venice perfumes again. I chalk this up to one of those rare vacation happenstances and splurges. Like the prickly Oswaldo that the regal Raja, they are nice to hang out with while there, but we probably won't meet again.  

Wallace Stegner, the novelist and western historian, said that there are two types of Americans: boomers and stickers (1). While he's specifically talking about the "boom and bust" west and the morally bankrupt view of manifest destiny, I think his division is extremely apt for a lot of perfume land, especially its more online manifestations. Look online and it's not difficult to find those boomers who want an easy recipe for fortune and fame. They view this hobby not as a way to have fun and meet people, but as an avenue for making quick money, flexing status symbols, getting insta-famous, and ultimately making a name for themselves. We've all seen them. Views, likes, engagement, optimization, AI, affiliate links, sloppy brand collabs, PR bottles, and money are the order of the day. As soon as another avenue opens, these boomers will pack up and head to greener, more lucrative pastures like their gold rush forebears. 

Stickers on the other hand, are those determined to remain, to build, and to maintain. When the perfume game dries up, these stickers will ultimately be the ones that will be left. They'll have to fix the mess left behind by these opportunistic boomers. They're committed to building a community for perfume folks of all stripes. Many were here before the boom and will still be when it's maxxed out. They've successfully turned what was once a luxury consumer good into an avenue for thoughtful discussion, artistry, and comradery. They've imbued the hobby with endless creativity. Most aren't content creators or even flashy limelight seekers.

It's far too easy to lob softball insults at the boomers. While these are often humorous, they've become a discourse of their own. Far too much energy has been spent talking about those "on the make." What is far more interesting to me is the growth of communities forming among fragrance stickers. These previously online communities are now starting to crystalize into real life and in-person manifestations. As festivals have been springing up over the past two years (Fumed in Chicago and ScentFest SF in San Francisco), I thought it a good time to reflect and acknowledge those who have been integral in my own perfume community of Seattle. We are blessed to have a decent amount of clubs and meetups, shops, artists, and independent perfumers camping out under the big tent of perfume in this city.

Consider this post then, a long overdue love letter to my local perfume "scene" as it were. In no particular order, these are stickers who bring others together, show up, collaborate, encourage, and continue to build community: 

Donna from the Scent Lending Library @Lipowitzsmells

Noele and Aubrey from @exlibrisodoratis 

Jen from @Immortalperfumes

Jaimie @jaimiequeue

Jenny @scentsplorist

Ryan @kraelik

Haven @uncommonsmells

Kashina @illicium.verum.nova

James from @filigreeandshadow (now in Amsterdam)

Paripa from the Seattle Smells Discord group

Anjali from @anjali 

Megan from @refr_acted

Keep in mind that these people represent my own experience. I'm sure I missed some people in my own community. For that, I am sorry. I didn't want to just list brands or stores. These are important, of course, but I wanted to acknowledge those committed to the community aspect of perfume.

I want to know about your perfume community, online or in-person. Who are the stickers? Who are those folks who are building community? I'm particularly interested in those areas outside the metropolitan areas of LA, SF, and NYC.

I'm back on my old bullshit. Here's a little drone with samples of the slappy base of Sister Sledge's "We are Family," a Venetian Gondolier's whistling, and Cicadas in Lombardy: https://on.soundcloud.com/mx1DuwwVo9CFrzqLnW 

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1. This distinction is commonly reprinted by the Kentucky author and farmer, Wendell Berry. This theme is expanded in Berry's 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the Endowment for the Humanities https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-biography. He cites it to Stegner's, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, Random House, New York, 1992, pages xxii and 4.

Some perfume fans like to pack an arsenal of scents for a trip to create a precise mood (or moods), attempting to completely curate their experience. They stuff their purses and shaving kits with a mix of travel sizes and samples for every possible occasion. Others chaotically pack nothing and plan to buy when they get there, ultimately creating the necessity for their purchases (clever move). I guess I’m a little different in that I like to make a scent of my own to take along for the ride. That's not to say that I won't buy perfume on vacation. Traveling really provides an opportunity to get to know a creation intimately. It's also nice to get different scenery to evaluate a creation. As with the books I pack, I prefer not to tailor my creation precisely to the location though I'm cognisant that I might not want, for instance, an animalic musk in the sweltering heat.

When traveling to Iceland in 2023, I didn't make a purpose-created perfume, but I did take a homemade hodgepodge called “Kitchen Sink” that contained the "backwash" remnants of the droppers of osmanthus, oud, and other premium materials. I’ll always remember its smell as it slid out of view along with odd scent distortions due to COVID-related scent loss. See @eth.olfactive.studio on Insta for a description of the sculpture and scent I created based on that particular trip. I always get vivid scent memories while traveling. Sometimes, like Iceland, they are not all pleasant, but they're vivid nonetheless.

The creation I made for this vacation is inspired by Orval, a Trappist Belgian beer made at a Cistercian monastery in southern Belgium. The beer is extremely distinctive from its orangina-shaped bottle to its malty, subtly sourness laced with Brettanomyces. Some wine folks call it Brett, in a tone as if it were an aughts bartender in a ringer tee, frosted tips, and a leather wristband serving you a Syrah or Pinot Noir (yes, some of those varietals often have Brett too). Brett gives it a certain funk that makes it sour, yes, but not necessarily the over-the-top fruity tartness as many American sours tend to be. It has touches of banana that normally characterize German Wheat beers. Belgian beers also commonly use coriander and orange peel and I can sense a bit of those here as well. Due to its price ($6.99 USD / bottle), it's a special treat for me. 

I say inspired by above because my aim is not “photorealism,” a word and concept I’m growing tired of in perfumery…rice, milk, and tea/matcha. Leaving aside the imprecise cross-modal terminology, realism has become a checkbox for people as they go through note lists online. They atomize the perfume instead of taking it as a coherent whole. Enthusiasts have raised their expectations unfairly for this level of verisimilitude. For instance, if you put "rice" in the name (or notes), people will automatically judge a perfume by that.

I can just hear the Fragrantica review for my creation:

“I grew up drinking Orval in Belgium. I drank it in my baby bottle. In fact, my dad is a Trappist monk. I can say definitively that this doesn’t smell a thing like the beer. Complete fail.”  - Fragman007

This hypothetical reviewer would be correct that it probably doesn’t smell anything like it, by strict realistic standards. To me, some of these real-life referents are mere jumping off points rather than goals. They’re hops and turns rather than final destinations.

My draft perfume has some of that maltiness, as well as a touch of bent fruitiness from Ylang Ylang and some banana aroma chemicals. It also has a sparkly effervescence, though probably not as much as a beer perfume needs. In fact, Orval is extra bubbly in my experience. I used myrrh which has found its way into so many of my sketches recently. It lends a lovely medicinal cola/maltiness. Overall, the perfume is not sickly sweet or even that sticky resinous to me (my goal), even at 15%. I also added ginger and coriander along with a yellow mandarin, which might be too tart for the perfume and my taste.

Ultimately, I want this unnamed partially beer-inspired creation to be a study of oak moss. I actually used Evernyl/Veramoss (unlimited by IFRA) and a drop of oak moss tincture from my English Oak tree (extremely limited by IFRA). As this is my initial sketch (1a, the first iteration of the first sketch in my personal perfumery nomenclature), I will be seeing how it performs, how it wears in hotter climates and particularly in the beating sun. For a first attempt, I'm pretty impressed with it, which definitely isn't normal. I'll also be sharing with fragrance friends to get their honest feedback. They are often the best editors and it's often more in what they don't say that matters. 

When I get back, I’ll be adding more moss materials to my embarrassingly sparse collection and doing a deeper dive into evernia prunastri. I admit that I haven’t thought much about oak moss until now. It's been a way to easily convey chypre or fougere, a style signifier rather than an accord worthy of highlighting, tuning, building, and amending. I’ve heard the IFRA haters bang on about the good ol’ days before the oak moss limitation. It’s become such a well-worn chestnut that IFRA “killed” oak moss and perfumery. Aside from a few really informed folks, I don’t trust a lot of these tired takes. They often seem reductively lazy to me. Years ago, testing real oak moss abs. in overdose, I got contact dermatitis, i.e. a rash. I guess you can blame me for killing perfume. It was me. I did it though I blamed myself for not wearing gloves and foolishly not knowing proper limits. 

A potential rash won’t stop me from safelyexploring the various recreations (like Veramoss), the heavily-diluted real thing, and limitations of this interesting material that literally falls from the trees. To me, oak moss can have a dark effect, like a sun-warmed car in the driveway or like hot asphalt. It can also be dry, powdery, and sweet. These last three are the facets that I want to return to in future trials. I'd love to know YOUR favorite oak moss-centric perfumes. Ones where this material really shines? One that I can think of offhand is Etruscan Water, a neo-citrus chypre by Francesca Bianchi. Her signature velvety but sharp orris and a heaping of citrus make this perfume too powerful and scratchy for me to wear regularly, but the oak moss accord is definitely larger than life.

Due to the literalists spoofed above, if I were to actually create this for sale (which is highly unlikely), I would drastically change the marketing theme/concept to perhaps a "golden hour spicy tropical resinous" concept though none of those descriptors really fit exactly. As for a wearable perfume, I don’t think I really want this perfume to smell like beer and even less so like stale beer, if you know, you know. I simply don't want to be judged on inspiration, pen and clipboard in hand. I wonder how many of your favorite fragrance stories/themes were made after the fact to match the perfume or how many concepts were changed to accommodate a more compelling story. This doesn't make them any less valid, it's merely an interesting question that I haven't heard many people talk about. By compelling standards, my beer concept is pretty weak: "some idiot has a favorite beer." Great! If Orval commissioned this, that might be a whole other story, but Bernard of Clairvaux and I haven't been on speaking terms since the second crusade. 

I remember hearing of one such abrupt perfume concept change, but this is usually kept carefully under wraps by perfumers and brands. Would you feel betrayed if a brand did this? Does this even matter to you? I admit that I probably spend too much time thinking of these types of questions of stories vs. execution. What is enough story or concept? Is it like an online recipe where you just want the goods and not the book chapter on how it came about? Concepts can definitely be overwrought and confusing in my opinion. How much do people want to make their own associations? People do this anyway, despite the marketing and concept. How much do people want to be led (copy, marketing, packaging, note listings, interviews)?  

While you work out these important questions, I'll be on vacation.

After graduating college with little or no job prospects, I took a job at the Pennsylvania Conservation Corps at a state historic site. Not only did it sure up a lump sum payment for college (or in my case, graduate school), it also provided steady pay, though barely enough to exist. There I mowed grass, got poison ivy, cut down trees and milled them, chauffeured guys around in the white crewcab truck to get their GEDs (equivalent of a high school diploma), watched someone cut off the tip of his finger with a radial arm saw, did historic preservation of an old mansion, and gave tours of a 19th century iron works.

The only thing that I still have from that time is a pair of heavy brown leather work gloves. Their continued existence (over 20 years) probably speaks volumes about how much actual manual labor I’ve done since. Turn my hands over the next time you see me. These 20 year old gloves and my soft hands will tell my work history better than any resume could.

While far from pristine, these gloves are still usable. Detritus has found its way into them, packing into a hard mass in the fingertips. Years of working in all seasons has hardened the palms of these once supple gloves into a gorilla-palmed like shiny silver gray. Aside from their continued usefulness, their smell is absolutely wonderful. It’s a mixture of rough, dirty brown leather and leaf mold, not as satisfying or classy as, say, an elegantly worn leather handbag or a baseball mitt, but they are still smellable (at least when no one is watching). Overwhelmingly, however, my gloves contain the smell of a mossy stream bed. In Seattle, I get plenty of damp and dreary waterlogged mossiness, but there’s something specific about the smell of an eastern trout stream and this familiar scent inhabits these gloves.

Coincidentally, this sentimental smell is also found in the deep deep dry down of Sables by Annick Goutal now simply Goutal Paris (perfumer: Isabelle Doyen). The dampness, stale woods, and moss mingles with a subtly dusty green vanilla-leaning amber.

Most perfume reviews are like nuthatches, they skitter from crown to roots. Here, I’d like to take you in the opposite direction, from the ground up, flipping the pyramid.

My mossy glove imagery disappears and Central PA suddenly dissolves into a Mediterranean calanque as you move up through the dry down. Sables, or “sands” in French, was inspired by Goutal and her husband’s trips to Corsica, the veritable epicenter of immortelle (See Parfums d’Empire). Here, sandalwood enters the story and provides a dusty and light “sandy” woods effect. Doyen skillfully nails the creamy center of the sandalwood accord, so often lacking in modern sandalwoods, which normally brings the oblique intensity of molecules like Javanaol, but fails to “fill it in,” as if made of all bark and no heartwood. This is where Sables could have gone horribly wrong. While immortelle is the star here, a hollow thin modern sandalwood would have completely ruined it for me.

Moving even further up the tree, one encounters Sables’s main theme, a heroic overdose of immortelle absolute. I’m not sure I’ve encountered another perfume that uses as much of this material as Sables does. In a perfume, immortelle absolute provides the same textural feel as lavender does. It affords a composition a pointed prickliness to break up what would be here a simple and smooth structure. Yes, yes, I know, there are smooth lavenders and immortelles, but in overdose, the dry shrubbiness shows. Along with texture elements, immortelle also has a warming or drying effect as if the flowers found a devilish way to retain the warmth of the Mediterranean sun. Those looking for the odder fenugreek, curry leaf, or even celery seed facets of immortelle will not be disappointed either. These aspects are usually what drives people away, but for those true weird herbal fragrance lovers, this is a real treat.

To me, immortelle absolute also has a glint that your perfume might have gone off, a smell vintage perfume fans devastatingly know all too well. It’s a dark and dank inkiness that usually signifies defeat, money down the drain, but here is part of its charm. While I’m not a synesthete in any sense, immortelle (and civet) is the color black to me. As I’ve mentioned before, it was immortelle that transfixed me in Provence and not the ubiquitous and overloved lavender of the tourist shops. Everywhere I went, I grabbed a flower or some leaves to rub in my hands to get that dark curried scent stuck on my hands. I saw bundles hanging upside down at markets and helichrysum and rose homemade perfumes at farm stands.

Moving further up our fragrance tree is a cinnamon that mingles and highlights immortelle’s maple sugar facets. The result is almost gourmand-ish or at least to my large teenage son. He remarked that I smelled like a cinnamon bun. If he thinks I smell like the local Cinnabon, wait until I tell him about modern and actual gourmands.

The actual crown of Sables is uninteresting. The light citrus elements are there to add structure or lift and not to signal that you’re lounging on the Amalfi Coast or on a ladder in Florida slicing a piece of orange for an eager tourist. All in all, Sables is a simple perfume though that doesn’t mean that it’s simplistic. I’m constantly blown away by the fact that Sables came out in 1985. This overdose of immortelle seems thoroughly niche, well beyond the big fougeres of the 1980s conceptually. To put this perfume into perspective, Drakkar Noir won the FiFi award in the same year in the men’s fragrance of the year - prestige category (1). We are also 9 years after the founding of L’Artisan Parfumeur (1976), 9 years before the creation of Iris Silver Mist (1994), and 15 years away from the quirky oddballs that came out of Comme des Garçons.

Sables still seems out of place, even by today’s standards. The cool kids have moved on to newer flashier concepts and caps shaped like asteroids while the Sephora crowd probably views it as too out there and old-mannish. There are not sufficient notes listed (only 6) on the “fragrance site” that will remain unnamed to help newbies and clueless influencers if they ever encountered this perfume, which is doubtful. More and more, people need these footholds and be walked through the fragrance, as if being unknowingly trained as marketers. For those glued to notes and pyramids, Profumo is a better reflection on what forces are at work in Sables. It’s odd that the website for Goutal Paris doesn’t even list Sables anywhere. I’m not sure what this means, but I’m glad I got a bottle when I did.

If you sit with this otherworldly immortelle specimen for a while and really get to know it, you can see the ghostly remnants of past masculines start to show themselves, oscillating between the strange and familiar. The moss, vanilla/amber, cinnamon, and aromatic touches don’t seem all that odd when written, though in execution, this perfume defies easy categorization. It’s not quite a common masculine fougere. It’s not quite a gourmand. It’s not quite an amber (old or new). She uses immortelle as an aromatic in an ambery fougere structure, but the result is just so profoundly unlike what has come before (and I might argue since).

The closest thing to Sables in my mind is L’Eau des Immortels by Voyages de Imaginaire. Surprise surprise, it was created by none other than Isabelle Doyen herself and her handiwork is clear. The raw roughness of Sables is still there, but has been smoothed out for a new audience. Like Olivia Giacobetti did with fig, Doyen solidified her place in perfume history with the benchmark immortelle perfume and given the unknown status of Sables, L’Eau might be a suitable replacement. Eau Noire by Dior is another similar perfume, though not so much in feel, but in overall structure. Kurkdjian takes the shrubland wildness of the original and tames it by putting it into a more palatable modern spicy fougere box, like 2 Man except with lavender and and a licorice-inflected immortelle. Both of these iterations only hint at old school masculines and their aromatic idioms. Maybe that’s immortelle’s natural habitat, substituting the fougere’s forest-canopied fern for a dry and dusty Mediterranean setting.

My usual modus operandi is to “smell them all,” get all the samples of immortelle-centric perfumes to compare/contrast. Only then will I conquer the sun, unite the east and west, and become emperor. This note hunt is probably familiar to some of you. I rushed to sample Everlasting by Scent Trunk (Perfumer: Hans Hendley) and the newish Immortelle Solaire by Les Indemodables, and was on the cusp of seeking out the new Frédéric Malle Contre Jour, but I immediately caught myself and questioned these obsessive motivations. In the past, I chalked this up to mere curiosity, but I’m not so sure now. Is it an urge to find the best possible version of the thing in my mind, the Platonic ideal of a style or material? Why do I need to smell all the possible versions of this material to appreciate it? Why the rush? Those later iterations usually never quite stack up and these two were definitely let downs. Immortelle Solaire seemed to hint at helichrysum essential oil and its slightly fruity aspects while Everlasting utilized IBQ (the ashy green leather molecule) to augment the immortelle and dry it out even further if that’s possible. It works to a degree, though I find myself repelled by this material depending on the day, even though Hendley uses it in such a small amount. The Afternoon of a Faun by ELdO was perhaps the most disappointing that I’ve smelled. I had such high hopes for the rose and immortelle health food market combos of my France trip, but to me, it was so angular and sharp, feeling almost like the abrupt stomach kick turn that you get when you cut yourself with a freshly sharpened kitchen knife or a razor blade. Oriana Neves has a great piece on the recent growth of immortelle perfumes.

While not the main feature, two other examples that I own have skillfully integrated immortelle into the composition without losing the overall material thread. Fate Man by Amouage takes immortelle and pairs it with a cumin-soaked incense core. The result is more curry leaf and culinary. These types of opulent oddball creations are what initially drew me to Amouage and similarly have pushed me away with their newer and blander perfumes. Taking immortelle in a completely different direction, 1740 by Histoire de Parfums creates a smokey vanillic amber with heavy davana lending a red wine feel. The immortelle here adds subtle texture to what would be an overly smooth fragrance.

While Sables might be outdated to many, and might be discontinued (if you know, let me know). I’m still glad that immortelle as a material lives on and that perfumers continue to feature it either in name or prominence. While Annick Goutal died in 1999, Sables is a testament to her contribution to perfumery, directing a fragrance both out of time and ahead of its time. It’s also a feather in the cap of Doyen, the author of two of the most innovative perfumes (in my opinion): Sables and Nuit de Bakélite.

My dronish piece mixes up a NASA low frequency recording of the sun and a little beatbox rhythm, yep, almost a beat. I thought it a perfect tribute to the sun-drenched everlasting flower.

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(1) Fragrance Foundation Awards, Awarhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiFi_Awardsds - Wikipedia

Glitch By me of "Kuchi nashi - cape jasmine" by MegataMorikaga. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2009630239/

Rarely can I pinpoint distinct eras of my ever-evolving perfume taste, but one time period sticks out as particularly significant. It was during the Covid 19 lockdown, and while many of you were getting into niche artisanal fragrances for the first time, I was expanding. Instead of retreating into the root cellar of comfort as the dirt devil of misinformation, rapid structural change, death, and fear whirled all around us, I flung open the Bilco doors to embrace change, albeit from the comfort of my own home (1).

This period marks the bending and snapping of my own brittle scent boundaries. White florals and tropical floral perfumes in particular have been largely "off limits" to most straight, white, and cis men like myself (at least culturally in the US). Sadly, this prison is of our own making. Well, the marketers who exploit these differences and prey on our insecurities also share a good deal of the blame. This, however, wasn't always the case. In the past, there was greater fluidity around fragrance and flowers, though from perfume counters today, it may seem as if it had always been that way (2). For instance, flowers were worn on the lapels of socialites in France and America in the late 19th century. Edith Wharton's narrator in The Age of Innocence stressed the importance of flowers to a man's wardrobe. About Newland Archer, the main character, the narrator warned of "never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole" (3). Even before the Gilded Age, violets and carnations (see Oscar Wilde) were popular lapel additions for men and dandies especially. Now, these adornments are reserved solely for high school proms and are usually unscented.

Nothing better illustrates the porous boundaries than the now ubiquitous drugstore men's staples, Canoe and Old Spice. These two classics were originally marketed to women, and it was only during the 1950s that they slowly acquired their masculine baggage. One of the first "for men" perfumes explicitly called out by name was Caron's aromatic lavender powderpuff, Pour Un Homme (1934), followed by Chanel's lean citrus chypre, Pour Monsieur, twenty years later (4). I call these out specifically as they are ones still in production. These outright gender signifiers, however, were few and far between. It wasn't until the 1970s (and even later) that distinctive gendered perfume naming really calcified into what we know now.

The Pour Hommes, For Mens, and Per Uomos now seem pedestrian compared to some of the more militaristic and hyper masculine imagery we're fed today (5). We need cartoon lumberjacks to make sure we bathe ourselves properly with soap. We need everything man-coded to ensure our masculinity remains intact lest someone mistake us for something less than a brute. My favorite chestnut is Dude Wipes, maybe followed by Manscaped. While not all of this ridiculous man marketing makes its way to fine fragrance, we nevertheless are conditioned by it. These days, perfume positioning is a little less on the nose (no pun intended). Perfumes must rely on external meaning (i.e. outside of the product) to do this gendering work. Print advertising still sells images and aspiration as it always has done, but now social media is where most of the mediation occurs. It's not done by celebrities, but by flat-bill hatted 30 somethings backed by walls of fragrance, scenmaxxing teens, AI dross peddlers, suave old money cosplayers, and overspraying dunces. For better or worse, it's these influencers who now negotiate and form the masculine perfume canon. Department store perfume counters are still largely physically separated by gender further deepening the divide. Reviewers still have to mention that "Perfume has no gender, wear what you want," as if it's a Surgeon General's warning label on cigarettes. With the rise of the manosphere and the current political climate (in America), I wonder if we'll see even more outrageous marketing peppered with alpha-male soaked misogyny in fragrance copy or names. I admit to being slightly dramatic here, but think about the straight men in your life. Ok. Now what type of fragrances do they typically wear? Do any of them wear white and/or tropical floral perfume or any type of florals at all?

The perfume that embodies my own mansformation [sorry] from relatively floral avoidant to floral enjoyer is Aroon Sawat, released in 2019 by the Thai perfume brand, Strangers Parfumerie. While Strangers epitomizes the creativity of artisan and independent perfumery, Aroon Sawat is not particularly iconic (it's discontinued), nor is it edgy or extreme in a way that's popular these days (it's relatively tame by those standards). Rather, it's memorable on a personal level. 

The name Aroon Sawat means "good morning" in Thai and captures that temporal feel without succumbing to cliched bright and bracing citruses. So instead of Folgers Crystals and optimistic outstretched arms with a refreshing "greet the day" sigh, Aroon Sawat feels like you're on a white sand beach watching the sun come up through squinted eyes after an all-nighter. It's almost as if the best part of waking up (using the line from the old Folger's commercial) is not going to sleep in the first place! Well, it's not exactly a hangover type of nauseating, but you nevertheless get an impression of enveloping haziness and brain fog. It's the bottled realization that if you had had one more drink last night, your day would be excruciatingly ruined. This teetering balance usually makes for a good perfume (at least in my opinion). It lives between safe and sadist. If you read enough reviews (ok, good reviews), you'll notice there is a fine line between disgust and desire in perfume.  

Tropical fragrances are an odd bunch. They can utilize sunscreen salicylates like the iconic Carnal Flower by Frederic Malle. They can go jungly, like the swelteringly beautiful Tropic of Capricorn by Olympic Orchids, which you almost have to machete your way through the dense florals some days. Some just nail the sensual beach brief like Parfum d'Empire's Un Bel Amour D’été. Others simply rely on overdosed beach blanket vanilla and banana boat coconut to get you packed and on the flight to your beach getaway. Of this type, there are plenty of cheap and cheerful mass market favorites to choose from. What kind of perfumes (or scents) do you typically associate with "tropical"? I'm mainly an eastern woodland creature ("I live between the heron and the wren"), so I find it strange that I've gravitated to this genre at all. I have no real frame of reference for tropical anything since Florida (Atlantic side) was the most tropical "exotic" vacation destination of my youth.

Aroon Sawat defies easy categorization. In addition to being tropical, Aroon Sawat is also fruity, though not in a classical peachdust c-14 kind of way and nor is it a juvenile fruitchouli rendition of pay-by-the-pound candy bin fragrances. It reminds me more of Hawaiian Punch, which was served at birthday parties as a kid, usually cut with ginger ale. The fruit punch here is more pomello rich (listed in the notes) and seems like some clever parent who thinned out the party punch to make it less syrupy, last just a bit longer, and more importantly, to temper the inevitable craziness, reminding me of the symposiarch, the master of ceremonies, who diluted the wine in ancient Greece in a similar fashion. [I recently made my own fruit punch accord and have been toying around with this extremely nostalgic smell].

Despite the above critique of straight men not liking white florals, they are not as distinct here as in others in the genre. Gardenia, tuberose, and orange blossom are listed, but are incredibly hard to pull out. Though I hate to use this descriptor, this is a case where the generalized "white floral" designation is entirely appropriate. Gardenia, which is normally hard to miss in fragrances, never shines through to reveal its peachy, earthy, or mushroomy underbelly. Tuberose, on the other hand, is generally more chimeric in fragrances, as it shifts to suit the perfumer's needs. Tuberose absolute (the material) is rooty and tannic to me, while accords can skew white and jasmine-tinged (Moon Bloom or Tubereuse Absolu), mentholated (Flos Mortis or Tubereuse Criminale), or more solar (like the aforementioned Carnal Flower). None of that distinctiveness is here in Aroon Sawat, almost as if Prin doesn’t want you to get too bogged down with trying to identify flowers on your path down to the beach. He wants you to put the egghead guidebook down and just have a good time, get some sun, and order a Mai Tai. 

The main player in the base is a radiant sandalwood that helps to amplify the mid and top. There is also a subtle reference to classic mossy masculines that I can’t quite pinpoint, even after my nose goes anosmic to the large sandalwood molecules. I think this masculine allusion was comforting while getting used to my floral training wheels. Myrrh and incense are also listed, but I struggle to make them out clearly. Again, it feels more atmospheric than in your face acrid or phenolic. Despite what I've said about vague flowers and thin fruit punch, Aroon Sawat is not a shy fragrance in the least. It's loud and brash, but not in the ways that make modern designers mostly obnoxious, yet Aroon Sawat and some of Prin's other creations (A Sorta of Fairytale in Hyde Park comes to mind) are in conversation with these mass market hissers, especially those big 1980s loud florals.

I don’t wear Aroon Sawat much anymore. In fact, I’ve only just received it back from my daughter. She shares this COVID scent memory with me as she associates the scent with me and, unavoidably, with that uncertain time. Like other kids, the pandemic was especially hard on her. She remembers playing outside and being confined to our yard, talking through the fence with friends and outright refusing to attend screen school. Despite these lingering negative connotations, she still enjoys Aroon Sawat fondly. I could always tell when she sprayed it, the sandalwood materials quickly finding their way into every nook of our small house. For a twelve-year-old, it's a bold move as it isn't a sugar-coated gourmand or TikTok-approved (she's not allowed on there anyway). 

This small act of sampling and buying white florals like Aroon Sawat during the opening throws of COVID significantly opened up my world to perfumes that I could not only sheepishly appreciate in the comfort of my home, but unabashedly wear on the regular. Now, I count vintage Miss Dior with its lily-of-the-valley-doused gardenia as one of my favorite perfumes, ever. While I’m usually hypercritical, I will also always smell a tuberose perfume when it’s on offer. In fact, my daughter and I both got samples of Amouage's Love Tuberose yesterday. Gardenia remains my favorite flower and I wait patiently for my frost-proof variety to grow and bloom sometimes twice in the summer. I still enjoy masculine-leaning and even some masculine-marketed fragrances, but it's nice to know that it's now a conscious choice and not simply the result of some set of cultural codes forced upon me.

Here's another drone-ish thing using some old sounds, new sounds (a treadmill), and a Folger's ad. https://on.soundcloud.com/YtIsNkPXl6PGUTAhuo

___________________________

(1) I recognize the privilege of writing about perfume during this time when I didn't lose any family members and close friends.

(2) "Perfume was more unisex than it is now although Victorian male users were generally dandies or bohemians." Catherine Maxwell, “The Olfactif,” Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage, accessed March 11, 2026, https://encyclopedia.odeuropa.eu/items/show/21.

(3)  Wharton, Edith (1928). The Age of Innocence. D. Appleton and Company, p. 3.

(4) I found a few earlier listed on Fragrantica: Worth Pour Homme (1932) and Dunhill for men (1934). Mouchoir de Monsieur by Guerlain (1904) could easily claim the prize for the first masculine-named perfume, at least conceptually.

(5) See also Duke Cannon's Naval Diplomacy soap.

What would happen if I bought a perfume and didn’t tell a soul about it? What if I kept it to myself and told absolutely no one while I wore it nearly day in and day out for a few months as I usually do with new perfume purchases? Not a peep to anyone in my local perfume groups, not my fragrance friends online or in person, and not even the person who introduced me to it, which for a kudos-giver like myself might be the most difficult.

I wear a lot of perfume without telling anyone. I make sketches and mods of my own work and I also test out fragrances constantly, mainly at night. What makes this idea different though is that it will be for an extended period of time (a whole season). For context, I choose one perfume to buy per season and wear it almost exclusively, which I've learned is anathema to perfume enthusiasts. For my deep winter and early spring perfume choice, I will not be mentioning anything about it to anyone. No words, posed bottle photos, AI slop, or reactions. This new and unnamed acquisition will sit silently on my silver perfume tray waiting for each new day to enjoy, think about, study, and wear. My concealment is not due to any sort of embarrassment. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It has picked up a lot of good press last year and rightfully so. People who I respect and trust have gushed over it too. Nor is it some veiled attempt at gatekeeping. Sadly, I'm usually the one finding out about perfumes long after their initial hype has waned so I'm hardly the bellwether of what's cool and new. Rather, this is a rare opportunity to have something that feels entirely mine. I can liberate it from the sometimes near psychopathic masses on fragrantica, their flippant reviews crowding my already limited mental real estate. I can also wrest it from the clutches of Luca Turin, the expert, though he actually seemed to have liked it. I can exercise it from lists and scents-of-the-day posts. Finally, I can pull it back from the void of indifference.

This idea naturally prompts the "tree falling in the woods" philosophical question for modern perfume appreciation: Does a fragrance exist for you if you don't post photos of it, write about it, review it, talk about it, and get likes and comments about it? This is the ultimate conundrum of social media. Photos or it didn't happen. Life is content; content is life. Where does online life stop and real life begin? I know that the horse is well out of the barn for that last question, but my point is not profound social commentary; it's more personal and reflective of my own habits and process. Perhaps, it's a Lasch-like symptom of a new culture of narcissism or return to the Wolfe's "me generation." Maybe I'm simply protecting my peace in the therapy speak so popular these days. I fully acknowledge that it's a bit egotistical of me to think that anyone would care what I did (or didn't do) on a daily basis. Since my entire social media presence is devoted only to perfume chatterings, this might seem antithetical, almost like committing social media suicide. Oh and yes, I understand the irony of writing about not writing about a perfume.

My hidden choice brings up yet more questions about the importance of naming. I can tease you that it's a billowy dirty floral, tropical, but not exactly beachy. I can also tell you that it features one of my favorite tropical flowers and that when I smelled this particular flower for the first time, I was simply blown away. I can also reveal that it contains another polarizing note (also one of my favorites), prompting me to want to recreate an old perfume I made for a friend that features it prominently. I can tell you all of this, but if I don't tell you its name, does it even matter? There's almost no reference for you the reader to grab onto and this brief anonymous description offers little opportunity for connection. You can't go out and buy it because you don't know what it is. The brand can't like and comment. This is a subtle reminder that in a lot of ways, we're writing unauthorized copy for fragrance brands.

My self-imposed perfume NDA can also be viewed as a personal ethnomethodological experiment. One of the most playful parts of this research design is conducting small absurdist real life experiments where the researcher does the opposite of societal expectations and then observes the results...for science! For instance, if you turned around and faced your fellow passengers in a crowded city elevator and then crouched down, you would then observe their responses. Breaking these little unwritten social norms could help to reveal hidden aspects about these situations, the people in them, and perhaps society at large. These zany designs remind me of the old Hidden Camera shows where the outrageous prank is revealed at the end, the third wall broken. I'll save you all of my mischievous ideas utilizing this design's social application in the perfume world (such as spraying perfume into mouth, creating an all civettone perfume, showing up to a luxury niche perfume swap with Avon bottles, etc.), but ethnomethodology does have an interesting application on the personal level. P.S. I’d love to hear yours though.

I've gotten into a predictive pattern where I discover a perfume that moves me immensely and I, in turn, write about it, honing both my writing and noticing skills. My urge to express, capture, share, comment, connect, and articulate is incredibly strong and my seasonal buys have been ample fodder for writing and a long slow reflection on perfume. A refusal to engage with a moving perfume in my usual way may seem like I'm edging that much closer to some type of monastic, guilt-ridden, and unfun version of perfume appreciation, but I assure you that this isn't the case. When my default has been to post, comment, and connect, I want to find out what happens when I do the opposite. The answer remains to be seen, but I thought it an interesting enough endeavor to try. I don't expect to be rewarded like George Costanza in Seinfeld (SE5:EP22) when he does the opposite of his instincts. Instead of turning my life around, getting the girl and the Yankee's head office job, my reward will hopefully be a more informed view of me and my place in the community that I've created or in some instances, has been created for me.

I understand that this project may also read as anti-social, but my aim is more to isolate those social pressure points where I might otherwise chime in or gush about a particular perfume, in essence, catching myself, and stepping back to examine my motivation/impact/usefulness. Even before the perfume hit my door, I've experienced moments recently where I've stopped short of commenting/responding about it. I want to continue that reflexiveness. Conversely, it's also a chance to highlight the loss of potential connections. I want to find out how not sharing alters my experience. Does it smell as good without the stream (or in my case, trickle) of likes and comments? I've prioritized in-person events and writing longer form pieces this year so what part does short form social media play in my own enjoyment? How much external validation do I need that my choice is the right one or that my taste is acceptable?

Recently, this little exercise has taken on an ulterior motive. When I joined a local online perfume group, it launched me right back into social media land with its dopamine-fueled anxiety so this break is also partially a nervous system reset to my ping pong attention span produced by fragrance chatter. New year, new me, right? Compared to last year, I don't really have any grand New Year's resolutions this year, but one that really resonated with me is to "keep my thoughts to my damn self" and this applies to everything, not just my seasonal perfume choice. While I've championed negative perfume reviews in the past (mainly to counteract influencer shills and brightsiders), I've found that most of my comments are negative. These are mostly hypothetical and unposted, but they nevertheless take their psychic toll so I'll also be examining their role as well. I constantly remind myself that dislike of a perfume or brand doesn't equate to some sort of elevated taste, it simply means that I don't like it. Another reason to pull back is that my attention has been hijacked, taking me away from other more worthwhile creative pursuits. This distancing strategy worked wonders with Instagram so I hope it will work here.

Pre-pandemic, my perfume social media diet was extremely minimal (and admittedly not very social). It consisted of YouTube perfume reviews and Basenotes for reviews. It was primarily one way. This limitation created a hunger for information, connection, and community. Now that I am awash with it, I hope I can find some type of statis between the monastic and the manic.

So while I'll probably publish a few more articles on different things in the next few months, I'll be largely laying low and enjoying being a person who wears and makes perfumes. I'll certainly not be talking about what I'm wearing now.

I've made a short droney piece I call listen more / talk less.

There I was, engulfed in an eye-level cumulonimbus cloud, heavy, saturated to the point that I thought it might rain liquid cotton candy. My senses were overwhelmed and I felt cramped short human bodies moving thru aisle as if in an art farm, the din of undistinguishable chatter, small bottles of unknown use, and loud high-pitched perfume chained to the wall, like beauty prisoners or maybe just on beauty house arrest.

So what brought me to this strange land?

My teenage son listed “cologne” on his birthday list and I just knew that it would involve a trip to Sephora. I could have taken him to one of the lovely stores that sell niche and indie brands in town (Orcas Paley, Immortal, Nasreen). I could have swiped him ouds from halfway around the world from my personal stash. I could have sprayed rare discontinued perfumes that could easily sell for over $800 USD on ebay. I could have suggested samples of oddities that smell like bananas, burnt electronics, or rusty metal. Ultimately and unsurprisingly, these don't interest most teenagers. They have their own greasy motives, from flexing to maxxing. They have their favorite bottles in the form of pistol chambers, placed on dressers like artefacts in some type of masculine museum. They also have their own scent language that I sometimes struggle to understand, but am endlessly fascinated by.

We struck a deal that we could go to Sephora to test, but we would have to buy elsewhere (i.e. not supporting Sephora). This concession highlights my general approach to parental tastemaking and influencing. Like perfume, I've gone relatively light on directed style, music, and movie recommendations with my son. I would rather he discover things himself and develop his own ideas, tastes, and style. While I'm well aware that our kids internalize our views, prejudices, and ideas of the world (whether we want them to or not), I've seen more than a few hipster dads try to actively force their tastes on their kids and it comes off as desperate as the kids parrot these tastes back to whomever will listen. Your kid's four and his favorite group is the Wu Tang Clan. Sure. Did your daughter choose that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari tee shirt to wear for picture day herself? Ok. Have you noticed this nostalgic generative turn or am I being an old crank? Not only is this heavy-handed glory days approach a walking billboard of the parent's self-perceived coolness, it's also a surefire recipe for later outright rejection. Think back to your teenage years. How often did you listen to your parents about anything let alone anything related to style and music? Why is it any different now when YOU say it? Right, you're a lot more hip than your parents. Ok. Gotcha.

Even more, I've seen dads armed with the best intentions take up their kids' hobbies in hopes of forming some type of real connection only to have kids move on without looking back, leaving dad with the pristine condition skateboard or the new stiff baseball glove. "But you used to love baseball, sport." Ok, that example reads a bit Hallmarkian, but it largely rings true. My son's interests have shifted over the years, but I've found creative ways to connect without resorting to the usual tired dad tropes and without relying on expensive equipment and consumer goods.

My son and I connect primarily through ribbing and wordplay though not in the egghead Wordle/Will Shorts way. "This word has 8 letters, but the second letter is also used in a word that relates to bird anatomy." No. Our sense of connection is more of an organic playful banter of names, misnaming, absurdism, made up words, and slang. For instance, we constantly rename the cats. Our cat Arnold is now temporarily: Arnold von Sandwich, the party prince. [I've recently learned that not everyone changes the names of their cats frequently.] We’ve also recently named the cast of characters we routinely see on our short drive to his school and add more as they reoccur in our morning production.

Back in the depths of the black and white striped sugardome, I gave him carte blanche, the only instruction being to narrow his choices down to two perfumes so that he could wear them out on each hand and also spray on strips to take home to do a clear-headed comparison. Did I dadspain what he was smelling? Nope. Did I enumerate aroma chemicals likely to give the impressions he was getting? Nope again.

Initially, he was drawn to Dior Sauvage Parfum. Of course, I was silently hoping that he wouldn't choose to run with Johnny Depp, his swift pack of wolves, and/or the hoards who wear this. For those who haven't smelled this omnipresent profile, it has a fresh and sharp desert guitar citrus top like the original, but dries down to a sweet candied mess, a progression which reads as a metaphor for Depp's life. My son mentioned this abrupt right turn of the fragrance without prompting, an astute assessment from someone who doesn't think about perfume structure and materials all the time. Its brightness completely withered away to the parfum parlor trick of adding overdosed vanilla materials to signify depth and density to concentration-obsessed customers.

After we got home and returned to olfactive stasis, he chose Prada Paradigme, EDP, a 2025 release by Marie Salamagne, Bruno Jovanovic and Nicolas Bonneville, all of Firmenich. I'm not familiar with Nicolas Bonneville, but I know Marie Salamagne mainly from Mimosa and Cardamom for Jo Malone. Essentially, it does what the box says, cardamom and mimosa, but it deftly captures the textural and polleny aspects of mimosa with a dash of cardamom. I also know Jovanovic primarily from Frederic Malle's Monsieur, which is a refined vanilla, rum, and squeaky clean almost rubbery patchouli.

Prada Paradigme, however, feels like a departure from these slightly more interesting releases for slightly more interesting brands. Paradigme contains a citrus element with a geranium, something I could distinguish in on the strip on the ride home. It had a softness, almost a humming rosy quality that I thought well done for a newer masculine marketed perfume. From the strip and my hand, it conjured the ghosts of men's fragrances past with a touch of modernity. My inner soft boy was excited for this purchase. I love Houbigant's Fougere Royale, Chanel's Boy, and other fougeres with a touch of powdery soft coumarin-dusted mosses. I thought Sauvage's leather vests, midnight blue fedoras, heavy eyeliner, and boho/Roma wannabe jewelry would be nowhere to be found. In fact, Tom Holland is the boy next door spokesperson for Paradigme. He seems as far away from Depp as humanly possible and I thought a fitting poster boy as he stared back at me from the in-store ad. They are both safe, inoffensive, and without edge. It's what you would take home to meet your mother. "That's a nice sweater, Tom. Tell me again what you do for a living"

The scent we received was drastically different. I bought it from a major retailer so I'm convinced it wasn't a fake. He liked it, but to me, it was all sharp and slanted spices similar to the gingery feel in his signature scent, YSL L'Homme. Almost completely gone is the cleverly-used geranium too. It's heavily muted or mottled if at all here, which is too bad. More disappointingly, it included a giant sweet slug of modern vanilla materials. It's not enough to register on a geiger counter, but quite enough to creep into the top of the perfume. I attribute my earlier excitement to an olfactory hallucination brought on by Sephora's sensory payload. It could also be that I simply wanted it to smell soft, masculine and vintage, stuffing all of my desires into that little emerald bottle.

When Thomas Kuhn wrote about paradigm shifts in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he was referring to sea changes in thought and knowledge production specifically within the scientific community. This term eventually broke free from its academic fetters and all kinds of paradigms supposedly shifted, from those in the bedroom to the boardroom. Prada's Paradigme is aptly named. It merely forms part of the prevailing modern masculine scent paradigm in the more popular sense of the word. It fits in. It passes. It keeps its head down. It's perfect for teenagers not eager to be noticed because they simply all smell that way. 1-2-3. Citrus-Spice-Candy.

Though the modern connotation of the term is "model," Prada's new perfume is anything but. It's clearly a follower. Despite my overly eager early impressions of it, Paradigme hasn't shifted anything. It offers nothing new or different to the style. What it has done is reinvigorate my love of geranium and fragrances; it makes me want to (re)create that rosy geranium that I thought I was smelling in the car ride home: mossy, coumarin, rose, geranium, heliotropin, and a touch of citrus. Paradigme smells as if you were walking behind an overspraying teenager who is helping his distinguished grandpa across the street, the brashness of youth overshadowing a long respectable life.

Speaking of geranium, here's a little dronish creation based on the GMSC peaks of Egyptian Geranium from Eden Botanicals (lot 18) and a sample from a disco raga from the 1970s. If I could figure out a way to automate these peaks to make them more accurate, I would, but you'll just have to deal with all-of-the-lofi.

https://on.soundcloud.com/AwdpJheaY5TVnkf8F3

In Egills Saga Skallagrímsson, there's a scene where Egill and his friend Arinbjörn are discussing how to deal with the domineering King Hakon of Norway.

Arinbjörn carefully summarizes his strategy as: 

"..þá verður eik að fága er undir skal búa.“

This loosely translates to "you should tend the oak if you want to live under it." This proverb's figurative implications are interesting for the story as well as Arinbjorn's tactful and measured character, but it's the literal gloss that has stuck with me over the years, so much so that I carved these words on my backyard shed. It becomes that much more prescient in fall when my English Oak drops what seems like an infinite number of small lobed pale apricot colored leaves, finding their way into every crevice and crack from ground to gutter. So this nearly 800 year old saying (probably older) serves as my autumnal refrain, a gentle reminder that unlike Arinbjörn’s maintenance, mine is an act of love. The hassle, bags of leaves, and hours raking in the fall in turn provide ample shade for our small house, a respite from summer's evergrowing heat. 

During my many stints of raking, bagging, and tending my oak this fall, I discovered how perfectly the revived French heritage brand, Oriza Legrand's Horizon fits into this maintenance routine. While the copy reads that it celebrates its 100th birthday this year, as usual, the additional imagery doesn't seem to be written for me. It's even harder to situate the current formulation in the roaring twenties especially after reading the notes on Fragrantica, which is probably my first mistake (marmalade, soil, and cacao). Anachronisms aside, one thing that did resonate was the note of "old oak," listed on Luckyscent's website, less so for the perception of oak wood or oak barrels in the perfume and more for Horizon's steadfast feel; It's the old rugged cross and the rock of ages. It's a heart of oak and the pews of a white-washed Methodist church. My English Oak too is sturdy, resilient in the face of human greed. It was "ringed," the cut near the bottom of the trunk still visible, when we moved in. Owners wanted to kill it, showing to arborists that it was dangerous and had to be removed, more than likely in order to clear the lot and sell big. Today, its scar is completely healed over.

Horizon is built around patchouli, vanilla, and rose, an unmistakable combo that's just as common as it is comforting. Two other stellar examples of this style are Borneo 1834 and Psychedelique. The addition of the rose in Horizon dries out the patchouli and here in my driveway, makes the brown leaves that much more crisp. Patchouli is typecast in the role of soil, dank, and leaf mold. It contains just enough dampness from the last rain to make bagging it difficult. The mosses that dislodge from the tree adds a powdery green mustiness to the air. I stuff those into the bags as well as the Western Sword fern fronds, most dead-brown, but some accidentally fresh-green. I picture myself being mistakenly raked up and packed away into the lifesize hardware store leaf bags and sent to the compost center like Indian clothing shipped in patchouli leaves bound for England. Despite how much Horizon I sprayed, I would be moth eaten for sure. I look up at the block headed junkos, skittering higher than usual in the oak, dropping leaves here and there as they land on branches. They would have been easy targets for my old outside cat, Eevee, but now are free to move about all parts of the tree uninterrupted, their hubris noted only from the window by my attentive inside kittens, Arnold and Abbey. 

There is also generalized auburn sweet leafy woodiness in Horizon that I've never been able to adequately achieve in my own fall inspired creations. It reads as an old school tobacco, a style that's been updated with a sheer veneer of more transparent yet stronger woody ambers. Horizon is definitely an old manchouli (ok, I made that up), more at home with a staid pastoral outlook than the wild abandon of the dashing "on the make" urbanite of the era. My first thought is to rush to my lab to replicate Horizon, improve it, put my twist on it, and distract me from my other creations that have been taxing my brain. I'm fighting that urge amd focusing on tending.

The Old Norse word for fall is haust which doesn't have the leafy connotations that the American English word fall does. Haust instead meant harvest and could be used as a verb to mean to bring in the harvest. On one hand, I like the arborcentric term fall as it takes humans out of this age long pattern and makes us irrelevant. On the other, haust captures the human compact we have with the land. To me, personally, it precisely captures my physical actions required of the season. I'm harvesting, picking up, bringing in the leaves. My oak is one of the last trees in the neighborhood to completely drop its leaves. Leaves will be falling and I'll be both harvesting, tending, maintaining well into Winter.

For those still enjoying the fall, here's a Fall themed drone, called Haust.

When I work from home, I usually take a brief stroll through my neighborhood to clear away the cobwebs, which seem to be increasing at an alarming rate these days. Last week, out on my walk, as I turned a usual corner, I found a bottle of perfume lodged in a culvert. My new happenstance approach to perfume told me that I should definitely liberate and review this fragrance because how often do you find perfume just sitting in the grass? This is on brand for me as most of the people who know me wouldn’t bat an eye if I told them I picked up something on the road. I do, however, live by the the advice that Lux Interior of the Cramps gives in "Don't Eat Stuff of the Sidewalk": 

Don't eat stuff off the sidewalk

No, don't eat stuff off the sidewalk

You don't need it

So don't eat it

Compared to eating things on the sidewalk, simply picking perfume from the sidewalk though seems like fair game. Who knows, maybe this will be the best perfume I’ve ever smelled. What if it's so good that it makes it onto my "Top 10 Men's Scents to Find in a Culvert" YouTube video for 2025? 

As I knew almost nothing about this fragrance (aside from the brand and the minuscule perfume name on the bottom of the bottle), this could serve as some type of parlor trick where I expertly guess everything about it without helping information aside from the name, brand, and essentially what I can gather from the physical object and of course smell. I could show just how smart I am and how much I know about perfume. Kidding here, but I promise I didn't ruin the fun by peeking.

What I know

I know Azzaro is an / was an Italian clothing brand. Their Pour Homme, which I own, from the 1970s is an annisic fougere classic. If you like classic fougeres, then you would have no doubt smelled this before. I don't, however, know anything about The Most Wanted. The distinct bottle shape was familiar, so I must have seen it floating around social media and/or department store counters. For all I know, there might be a whole discourse about it comparing versions, flankers, and batch codes. My guess is that it's cheap as chips on discounter sites and probably forms part of the smell maxxing arsenal for teens. I doubt there is "discourse" about it, but there seems to be discourse about everything. I also had a sneaking suspicion that it might be stolen, discarded at the last minute, like utility bills in discarded stolen mail. 

The Bottle

The bottle looks like it's trying to imitate a revolver's chambers or maybe car's distributor cap, though the name "The Most Wanted" makes me think that a six shooter is probably more likely an inspiration. 

The black top and the brown juice, which was probably artificially colored darker than it really should be, hints at other black/brown fade color schemes perhaps to signify "night" or "dark." If I were "the most wanted," I probably wouldn't be out and about in broad daylight; I would wait until night. This fade to black color scheme brings to mind YSL La Nuit de L'Homme or D&G The One edp bottles. I wonder if it’s to evoke the tint of sunglasses. I've probably smelled these two, but don't remember much about them aside from their bottles. Frankly, I'm surprised that I even remembered their names.

The Smell

From the first sniff, my brain has already categorized this as a sweet lavender amber fougerish designer fragrance par excellence. The bottle design and color must have helped to signal this. There’s a bergamot at the top that combined with an aquatic touch gives off that 1990s fougere feel. It's sharp and high pitched, almost metallic. The element that sets The Most Wanted apart from say Cool Water is the overall powderiness. My initial impression by way of comparison is that it feels like a denser and less loud version of JPG Le Male with its characteristic lavender and vanillin / ethyl maltol sweetness. The lavender here is flattened, its rough camphorous edges smoothed out.

It also has a heaping helping of chalky sweet orris, almost like a Dior Homme iteration without lipstick-orris facets. The orris allows the powderiness to extend from top/mid until the vanilla and musks can pick up the slack. I can just see the uninspired brief being handed to someone at Givaudan and the perfumer taking it sighing. It's not that The Most Wanted is not pleasant, because it is, but it feels uninspired and derivative. I would not seek this out and definitely wouldn't wear it when there are so many interesting perfumes (even marketed to men) out there. All one needs to do is take a trip back into masculine designer perfume history where you could pick up Gucci Guilty Absolute, YSL Kouros, and Caron Yatagan just to name a few mainstream oddballs. If your aim, however, is to smell like everyone else, then The Most Wanted might be a safe bet.

The amber is a diffusive and transparent modern superamber, but it's flattened out, subsumed by the vanilla and powdery orris materials. The amped up base materials are probably a reason for the dampened top. The amber has a subtle candied floral violet-like tinge to it that I smell in modern vanilla/orris numbers. 

Overall, it plays with that aromatic freshness meets sweet vanilla, a popular combination in designers but a far cry from the lavender + vanilla in the older Pour un Homme de Caron. This is just a hunch, but I bet that due to the fullness of the vanilla, which is almost caramelized and burnt, the notes will call out "coffee," though it doesn't smell of it at all.

The deep drydown is a powdery laundry musk, it's clean and almost has the hot fluff feel of a dryer sheet, like the type that the aromachemicals Habanolide or Aldambre provide. It's unassuming in a way that Le Male cannot ever hope to be so it's not as dangerous as the name might imply. More than likely, this perfume is the most wanted for tax evasion or insider trading and not first degree murder on the dance floor.

The Audience

From the bottle design and color scheme, I can also deduce that this is a fragrance marketed to men. *Big Suprise.* It fits into the growing tolerance among men for sweet perfumes. When did this happen exactly? Older landmark vanillas and powdery orrises (Like Angel Man, Le Male, and Dior Homme) were exceptions when they were released. Now they're commonplace as both men and women's perfume counters have skewed sweet. My teenage son thought that it was something that would fit perfectly into his high school. He has more aromatic designer tastes, but said that it smelled "like a high school cologne" in his words. I can definitely see a sharp bergamot/aquatic connection with YSL's L'Homme (a perfume he wears).

The "Big" Reveal

So after some research, I found that this was the Parfum version, implying intensity and concentration, but it didn't really seem that overbearing in my opinion. I probably could have read this if I bothered to get out a magnifying glass to read the extremely tiny sticker on the bottom of the bottom. All I could make out was The Most Wanted. It was created in 2022 without perfumer attribution, which is too bad. Of course, it has a few other concentration-based flankers, all with different notes and different colored bottles of the same 6-chambered design. I saw that there is an all black bottle flanker labeled "Eau de Parfum Intense." What does concentration language even mean at this point? Ok, there's an Edt Intense too.

Speaking of notes, I was way off, which I expected. On Basenotes, the notes listed are extremely sparse, even for a designer: Ginger, Vanilla, and Woods. One YouTube reviewer was angry about the 3 note list as if wanting to be told what the fragrance was about. I definitely didn't get a strong woody presence at all, but the vanilla was loud and clear. In fact, a clearly defined woody note would have given this a really nice backbone and would have broken up the orris, musk, and vanilla trio a bit, giving it a subtle complexity that I felt it lacked.

Fragrantica listed the same notes but added the descriptor "Bourbon" Vanilla, which I take as a nod to a toasted whiskey barrel and not the island. This could account for the coffee/toffee that I was getting. The ginger, I can see a bit more. To me, it had a muted lavender feel so common in this powdery sweet men's genre, but might explain a lack of projection. Ginger has also always been a warm spice to me, but the overall feel of the Most Wanted Parfum leans cooler (and powdery). I have to admit that when notes mention ginger in modern designer masculines, I rarely perceive them as the spicy root. Again, a noticeable spiciness would have added to the experience for me. 

The price seems to hover at around $100 USD, which is absolutely shocking to me for what this is. Again, I was way off, which is not surprising. It shows how out of touch I am with modern pricing schemes. I picked up a perfume from the ground FFS! 

As far as audience goes, I didn't really get a strong sense aside from the obvious "men" after looking at Fragrantica. I haven't delved too far into YouTube land, but I did see that there is chatter: Dupes vs. real, which flanker is better, alternatives, and don't believe the hype type of videos. So wrong again. If we turn to the brand's copy on its website, we see that it speaks for itself:

"Even more playful. Even more intense. The Azzaro Wanted man [sic] makes a comeback, and he's more playful than ever. His formidable weapon? A spicy and incredibly addictive fragrance: the new Azzaro The Most Wanted parfum."

In a very similar fashion, ChickenMadras, a user on Fragrantica, clued in on the weaponization of this perfume. He took the time out of his day in August of this year to call it an "Ultra sexy, insane milf hunting fragrance..." I can't attest to this specific use case, but I do want to wish ChickenMadras the best of luck in his hunt.

Finale

After some reconnaissance and extensive research (texting my wife), I discovered that a teenager lives in the house next to where I found it, so there's a good chance that it's his. After a few spritzes in a sample atomizer and on skin, I returned it to a safer porch location so that he would be reconnected with the 20ml left in the bottle. Hopefully no teenage drip was harmed in the making of this review. 

Exploring a virtually unknown fragrance (to me) in the wild really highlighted just how much mediation exists between the consumer (or enthusiast) and the actual perfume juice. This isn't a novel idea, I know, but it really showed how information can get in the way of experiencing perfume. We're told the notes, we're hearing advance reviews, and the brand shoves information down our throat. To be fair, brand copy is usually better than what I posted above.

It's fun to see the recent blind smelling things happening here on Substack. I must be tapping into some zeitgeist. I want to find a good way to explore this in some groups that I'm a part of. The most fun I've had is when someone hands me a moullette with no information (or maybe I simply didn't hear the explanation). Less of a stump the expert Grey Goose gotcha, and more a clearing away the noise.

I found that my temptation to look up facts about The Most Wanted Parfum was strong: the cost, the notes, the copy, and the reviews. It also goes to show how much these elements color my own exploration/interpretation of perfume. How often do we experience perfume completely unmediated? People call perfume the invisible art, but even my visual experience with the bottle and name betrayed preconceived notions of cost, quality, style, and audience, even before I smelled it. How much do we parrot listed notes, copy, or the interpretations of reviewers/influencers? This is a criticism of me just as much of anyone else in perfume land.

So how about you? Do you automatically hit the review sites/brand copy before you buy/sample? How do you think this affects your perception of the perfume when you actually smell it? 

In Einstein’s Dream, Alan Lightman wistfully imagines fantastical situations that a young Albert Einstein might have had dreamt while passing the time as a lowly patent clerk in Vienna. As you can probably guess, these hypotheticals deal largely with space, time, geography, memory, and history. In the chapter called "20 May 1905," he describes a town where people had no memories. As a result, they had to record everything about their lives in a "book of life." Never mind the logistics, citizens diligently recorded their life in books in order to remember their names, life events, their neighbors, and their professions. As people grew older, they had to decide whether to continue their books as they would take most of the day to read. Some younger inhabitants, however, grew tired of reading/writing their books and decided to live in the moment, that is, without memory.

I think about this allegory a lot. As an archivist, I routinely return to it to inform my thinking about documentation and history. It's been ruminating in my mind recently, however, in thinking about my approach to perfume appreciation and the data I create about it.

My Perfume Book of Life

I know that there are a lot of people out there who compile personal stats on samples, SOTDs, bottles, sales, and purchases, etc. I truly enjoy reading about those escapades. For instance, some good examples are: It Smells like Money here, Danielle at Perfume Collecting for Real People by Danielle on YouTube, and countless folks who do monthly recaps on Instagram.

Like the fed up citizens in the chapter of Einstein’s Dream, I’ve decided to personally discard my perfume book of life in order to live more in the moment. And like hypothetical Viennese that Lightman envisages, living without a memory comes with its obvious downside, but it's also freeing. Maybe it's some mid-life crisis (minus the sportscar) or perhaps some reaction to the craziness of my life right now, but letting go of my constant data collecting is one giant weight off my shoulders.

My Perfume Dataverse

My perfume dataverse wasn't as much as some, but was still enough to create an unneeded burden. I posted to Insta/Blue Sky to document my scent of the day (SOTD) almost daily for the past 2 years. As I've mentioned before, this became more of a duty and as a result, became less fun. These reviews often felt forced as I wanted to create new "content." I enjoyed connecting with people (new and old) and still do, but have leaned more into in-person connection and live in an area where that is possible. I enjoyed the longer form reviews on instagram, but even those felt incomplete or rushed. I would rather post them here or do some other creative endeavor.

For even more years, I had a handy lightweight google form (with name, house, release date, perfumer, star rating, and both long and short description a la Luca Turin to log my samples via my phone. I set this "app" up as a convenient alternative for my word doc that I used previously. As I had amassed a rather large backlog of samples to enter, this became a slog, yet another thing on my perfume to do list. I also tracked what I spent on samples and bottles for the year in my phone's notes app. This was a recent addition to my dataverse, but was yet another chore. I've always kept a "to buy" or "to sample" list in my notes app as well, but this is normally out of date as my whims change quickly so it became a largely useless void.

I'm glad that I never really got into the public review of perfumes on "the sites" like Basenotes and Fragrantica (I don't even have an account on Fragrantica). While these reviews are useful to an extent, these sites don't provide much of a community in my opinion (at least on the review side). The reviews that I did post seemed like I was yelling into the void so I quickly stopped.

I realized that not only are these data logging actions unsustainable (for me at least), but they ultimately took away the fun of actually smelling, thinking, and writing about perfume. For me, not everything related to perfumery needed to be rated, quantified, and described in detail, especially if I'm the only one who cared about it. I don't have a business; I'm not a trend tracker or an influencer either. Now I'm embracing more of a happenstance approach to appreciation. The joy of stumbling onto a new perfume has tripled. I'm not worried about recording it in four places. I can just smell, think about it, and if the mood strikes me, write about it.

For instance, I was at a perfumer's meet up recently and someone brought along Odor 93 by Meo Fusciuni along with some other of his scents. I was taken with it immediately. The following Monday, I realized I had ordered a small sample of that scent (along with other tuberose scents) and it arrived. This was a wonderful coincidence. The person who originally brought it (Hi Jaimie!) offered to make me a bigger decant and then knowing this I turned around and gave my 2 ml sample to someone else who likes his scents. This is the type of serendipity that I'm trying to cultivate that wouldn't have been as interesting if I kept a tighter control over what I ordered or smelled.

With a very archival lens, I took a hard and critical look at my data practice mentioned above. I asked myself what I actually would want to look at in 30 years. Initially, I envisioned my ratings and internal reviews might be turned into a rudimentary book like Turin and Sanchez's guide, but looking back, I'm not sure anyone would really be really that interested. Additionally, I would have to rewrite the majority of them as I've improved in my writing about perfume.

Would I want to look at a preserved social media feed of photos of perfume bottles? Even if I were a good photographer (I'm not), this is of very little interest to me personally. Would I want to see a progression of increased purchases over the years of 2028-2033? No again. Would I want to look at a rushed rating I gave a Tom Ford perfume from 2016?

Perhaps, it's a feature of getting older, but these were questions that I asked myself. I also questioned why I'm recording all of this. Maybe a better question is who am I doing this for? What purpose does it serve, and/or what purpose does it serve me? I didn't have a really good answer to these questions. If I'm being honest, I have to admit that I never returned to my old instagram posts, my review spreadsheet, or my spending tally, and I don't think that I ever will.

My one big caveat here is that as an amateur (I may have graduated from extremely amateur) perfumer, I've been increasing my data collection for sketches, mods, accords, and ideas around creation. Keeping good records as a perfume is paramount so in this realm, you can count me as a very careful Viennese city goer, who dutifully records his creations.

Also, as I mentioned in my Seasonal Perfume Post, I keep a fragrance diary where I list my seasonal focus along with life events as a general diary, albeit linked to the fragrance I was wearing. This however is less focused on perfume and more my life.

How much is enough data?

I go back and forth in my disdain for excessive data in general. I remember reading a book about "life logging" in the late 2000s and how Gordon Bell recorded endless hours and hours of video and even had an assistant to help document his life by scanning receipts and other normally discarded personal documents (1). While this ridiculous trend largely faded by the early 2010s, we now live in an age of big data where this type of compilation is routine. We don't need a secretary these days as we can (and other companies can) collect endless amounts of data about us easily and electronically. Some of this is by our own design. We freely give this away in the name of meaning and connection. For instance, we have apps that collect 1000s of data points for all aspects of our lives. We track everything from heart rate and blood sugar to movie and book ratings, most requiring very little from us. Others, however, more deviously track and sell our data under the guise of providing a service (social media, games, and other media). Where we put our attention, money, and clicks is logged away and sold to the highest bidder. Amazon will probably serve me up targeted ads for memory aids from reading this draft in gmail. Instagram will suggest memory care clinic reels.

Part of me thinks my hesitance of data collection could come off as anti-intellectual, the same strain that wants to throw out science in favor of wild speculation or ideology (see any newspaper article from/about the US). Or it could sound like I'm some sort of Luddite or Anarcho-Primitivist. Neither of these are true, though I guess I'm mainly against a techno-determinism outlook bent on endless growth and frivolous ideas of self-optimization. The idea that if we had more data we can solve anything. This hubris rarely pans out and usually ends up with Silicon Valley boobs who grandly pitch services and inventions that already exist. "Let ditch cars and invent a long car that seats many people and makes periodic stops to let people off."

This over documentation of our lives is obvious in the easy boomer social critique touchpoints like instagramming our food of 10 years ago, but it really hit home when visiting the zoo with my kids. I remember noting the amount of expensive digital SLR cameras people were toting around taking endless shots of anything and everything. Photos of their smiling kids in front of the jaguar enclosure are clearly valuable, but I thought what will these people do with all of those non-human digital photos of the tapir or the siamangs. Will they go home and diligently put them on their computer or maybe an external hard drive? Will they pull these out and show friends like an old time slide show? Do people actually delete photos? My main question though was: Will they look at the majority of these photos in 20 years?

As an archivist, I've been on the receiving end of these types of donations. I've had to appraise and accession hundreds of high resolution photos of a single event, choosing only a small amount to keep to adequately document the event. This weeding process is daunting and grueling given multiple events and terabytes of photos. Having to do this type of work makes me appreciate well thought out and composed photos with an eye to the future. Though we are past the snapshot era of the 1980s and 1990s, there is a real quality and quantity gap.

Probably just as Bell's secretary was scanning his receipts for his life log, my favorite absurdist stoner comedian, Mitch Hedberg (RIP) was penning this jab at overdocumentation, when he riffed on the ridiculousness of the common receipt:

"I don't need a receipt for a doughnut. I'll just give you the money, and you give me the doughnut. End of transaction! We don't need to bring ink and paper into this! I can't imagine a scenario where I'd have to prove that I bought a doughnut. Some skeptical friend...'Don't even act like I didn't buy that doughnut! I've got the documentation right here! Oh, wait, it's back home, in the file. Under d...for doughnut.'"(2)

Most people think that archivists like to save everything, as if that's our sole professional objective. These are often the same people that think that everything should be digitized and available online. Not only do they fail to see the hidden labor and resources needed for such a giant endeavor, they also miss the fact that archivists are just as much selectors of what doesn't need to be kept as they are of what needs to be kept.

I've veered far from perfumery and data creation, so to bring it back, I think that I'll probably won't miss much of the data that I've been collecting up to this point. My perfume book of life will look drastically different than it did in the past. Much of my work life and personal life depends on recordkeeping, saving, data management, and tracking things so it feels nice to let go of some of these and be in the moment. It's such a relief to be able to just forget about a shitty sample. It can go into a give away pile without much fuss. No review. No checking off of boxes or moving it out of my collection on Basenotes. No process. And no more additional guilt over a hobby no less.

What does your perfume dataverse look like? As I always say, there's no one right way to "do perfume" appreciation. The amount of data you collect doesn't make you a better or worse perfume enthusiast.

Ok, just a lightweight dial up drone for this one: https://on.soundcloud.com/rGDhZuDT62PXBeHENg

___________

(1) Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. Dutton: New York, 2009.

(2) Compare this flippant comedic approach to a receipt to David Levy's Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age and his first chapter about what we can learn about receipts. I also know that most of the first records were business records, receipts, invoices, etc. so I know the importance of receipts.

Time of the season, season of the witch, seasons in the sun, there is a season. Why do all the 1960s pop songs talk about seasons? I don't really have a good answer for you, but here's a drone made out of some of them.

I’ve mentioned my seasonal perfume buying/wearing strategy in my Astier de Villatte Delhi post a few months ago (and in a few comments here and there) so I thought I would take a little time to flesh it out in one "coherent" piece.

I want to start out by prefacing that this is only what I do personally; it’s descriptive and not prescriptive. I also want to remove any snark that inevitably sneaks in when talking about influencers and buying habits. I don't think I'm better than anyone and there's really no one right way to do perfume so keep that in mind.

Perfumer Pia Long wrote in Basenotes challenging the profession to come up with alternatives to fragrance appreciation that don't automatically lead to launching a perfume brand. Similarly here, I want to offer an alternative to other more intensive consumption patterns and another way to potentially enjoy fragrances. From Instagram, it looks like we all have disposable incomes and live in photography studios. Social media favors extremes so it privileges buying, the new, hypetrains, and on the other side extreme self discipline, monasticism, self help, as well as dramatic "fragrance addiction" type posts. 

1. Origin

I also want to give credit where credit is due. This strategy is not my own. I heard an outline of it in 2021 on an old episode of the Perfume Room podcast where Emma interviewed musician Buzzy Lee (Sasha Speilberg), so all credit goes to her. It was truly eye-opening then in its simplicity and after relistening to that episode recently, it's clear how much it became a guiding principle in my enjoyment over the past 4 years and while I've strayed from time to time, I always come back to it.

2. Choose One Main

At its core, it's pretty simple. I limit myself to one perfume per season to buy and wear relatively exclusively, which roughly works out to buying one every three months. This schedule allows me to focus on one main perfume and wear it consistently, get to know it, think about it deeply, decode it, forget about it, let it slip into the background, rediscover it, share it, and more importantly use and dent it. [soundbyte incoming] A dented bottle is a loved bottle!

There’s also a financial aspect to this schedule/regimen as my perfume budget doesn’t allow for multiple perfume purchases per month or really per season. I have a family, bills, and live fairly modestly so buying endless perfumes and collecting bottles isn't really my style even if it were within my economic reach. 

I usually don't go through an entire bottle in a season and have at least 10ml left over. I keep this as a "collection" of sorts, more of a time capsule. The topic of collectors and collecting is often contentious, sometimes reductively cordoning off enthusiasts into two camps: the hedonists vs. the puritans. I don't consider myself a collector in the least, but I also don't see myself as some kind of white-linen minimalist sage who looks down on Ikea shelves full of designer perfume. I'm also an archivist and am steeped in the idea of collecting. As any good archivist will tell you, you need a collecting policy to guide your collecting; this policy shapes a coherent collection and ultimately defines your institution. My perfume buying, on the contrary, is purely whim-based, another reason that I don't consider myself a collector. The simple act of buying doesn't instantly make you a collector. Maybe, my seasonal choice is a note search (mimosa, narcissus, etc.) or maybe a style (green chypres), maybe it's a long overdue bottle (Angeliki), or a just discovered obsession (Delhi or Nuit de Bakelite).

This Seasonal Acquisition Design or SAD for short really helps to prevent me from falling into the type of FOMO buying that can easily get out of control. For me, rabid Insta scrolling simply feeds this buying urge as I compare myself to others and worry about self validation that likes and comments give me. In the two years I was on Insta consistently, I ended up with more unused bottles than I was comfortable with. I wish I could be more nonchalant about social media use and pop in every once in a while [I'm working on it].

For you numbers folks. Let's break this strategy down. I've budgeted around +/- $200 for one main purchase per season ($800 total). This allows me to get most things that I would be interested in. To be honest, I'm not really into ultra luxury niche brands [snark removed] which routinely cost more than $350 and rarely deliver with originality or quality. Two hundred USD is enough to get a really nice artisanal or indie fragrance that I truly love. I can also spend more if I want and have it. Further, I'm a little more relaxed in the Summer. I normally just wear something I've already purchased or made.

3. How strict are you about this one perfume thing?

Like other regimens, lack of flexibility creates boring rigidity, which is not my intention with this strategy. While I do focus on only one perfume, I do wear and test a lot of others. I sample widely when I can. I'm lucky enough to be part of a local perfume group so I get to smell a lot of things without having to buy them. I also participate in swaps to refresh my experiences. How else will I find the next season’s focus? Endless sampling is another topic for another time. This too can be contentious. I'm also trying to step back from chasing the next thing, newness, the hype train, and the manic hunt even with samples. To be honest, I'm let down more often than I'm thrilled with new releases and most samples in general.

Further, I don't want tackle boxes full of samples just to hoard them like Rheingold. Perfumes are not like Pokeman in that I need to smell them all. I have to let some go. The sheer amount of releases is daunting to say the least [last I'll say about that]. If I don't have a chance to smell some reference chypre from the 1960s or the newest coolest chic brand that everybody is talking about, I just have to be ok with that. I'm getting to that point in my appreciation where I can be a little more chill though I know (and appreciate) the feverish feeling of those newish to perfumes where you want to smell absolutely everything.

I also create countless mods and sketches of my own perfumes (extremely amatuer here) so I can be found wearing those almost daily. Learning perfumery has taken up a lot more of my mental space over the past year. This has been creatively satisfying whereas following influencers and sampling and thinking of my next sample just isn't. For me personally, I view the wearing side of the hobby as complementary to making perfume. Without making, I probably wouldn't be as "into" perfumes as I am. This has been my trajectory with other making hobbies such as wine and cheese and I don't see it changing anytime soon. 

Inevitably, some other perfumes sneak inside my seasonal program. Whether it's on vacation or if James from Filigree and Shadow is shuttering his US shop and going to eat mussels in Brussels, it happens. Do I beat myself up for it? Nope. This is more of a guiding principle than a strict ruler knuckle-slapping. It's a refrain to fall back on, a gentle superego to help self-correct.

4. Why in the world would you do this?

I guess the short answer is that I want to form a relationship with a perfume, have a conversation with it. Some people can form thoughts and relationships with perfume easily, seemingly immediately (see the Scented Jedi's brilliant fever dream reviews here, or JJ Colbourne's @jjcolbourne learned and impressionistic posts, and Kashina's @illicium.verum.nova vivid tactile poetry reviews on Insta). For me, it takes time. Call it "slow perfume" if you will, but I feel that when I'm posting for Insta or Bluesky, I often rush a review or impression probably unfairly. These self-imposed daily deadlines create poor thinking and writing (at least in my case). Note that I didn't call this "content." 

At the end of the day, most perfumes are just not worth talking about, in my opinion. As I've stated before, I'm rarely bowled over/blown away by most perfume these days, but if you see it here, then you know that it's a true love, not a PR bottle, and not just daily content to stay relevant for the algorithm. Instead of slagging off some hard scrabble indie brand on social media, I just won't buy or write about it. Also, I don't think scent of the day (SOTD) posts are sustainable for me. They were fun ways to connect at times, but they ultimately sapped my energy. I still believe that negative reviews are valuable for the simple fact that you can't like everything. I just won't be wasting much time and energy on them. This seasonal strategy both prevents overconsumption (for which I am prone) and maybe more importantly, it allows me to date events of my life to a certain time period AND a perfume. I started a journal type document where I record the perfume of the season along with bulleted life events going back to 2021. Here the focus is on life events, not necessarily perfume. Perfumes simply help anchor these events. I've never been a consistent journaler, so this is a welcomed mental work around.

As a great example, my daughter fondly remembers me wearing the tropical Aroon Sawat and you can see below that it was the spring and summer of 2021. I can look at my diary and discover what was going on at that time if I don’t remember. Of course, we all know that this was during the COVID epidemic, where we homeschooled our kids, and many of you got into fragrance. This was the time that I got into subtly fruity white florals and in particular Prin Lomros's perfumes and Bortnikoff's Amber Cologne. In fact, she borrowed it last year and wore it.

Without a "Signature Scent" (remember those), this is the closest that some fragrance fans might come. It's our chance to act like the normies if only for three months. I call it a “signature scent for the season.” Just this week, two pieces here have called for or signaled the demise of the signature scent. Pierre Voulard states bluntly “The signature fragrance is dead.” (1)

Counter to that, just look at the comments to the fragrance review sites. They are filled with nostalgic memories of parents' or relatives' perfumes, "This is what scent I associate with them" type of statements. Or "this is the scent they wore when they were going out and kissed me goodnight." Today, for fragrance fans, our families and friends will probably lack those deep associations of a certain scent. Isn't that a bit sad? Ok, I'm being a bit melodramatic, but for me personally, this is the type of relationship I'd like to have with perfume.

5. Creativity

More recently, I’ve been writing about these seasonal focuses on Substack, something I hope to continue. This writing practice is the one thing I actually liked about Instagram, the writing and editing of my thoughts. If a perfume is worth wearing for 3 months, then it’s definitely worth writing about. This allows for a much more feasible publishing schedule than the daily grind of Instagram. It also prevents the type of forced reviews that I am guilty of. I often felt like perfume Instagram wasn't made for me since I didn't wear something different everyday. 

This might be extremely presumptuous of me, but I want to create a body of work that I'm actually proud of, or that I could hypothetically publish in a book, if I really wanted to. Most of my Instagram feed is simply not that. Substack thoughts allow me to tie in personal bits, cultural criticism, history, and anything else that strikes me. There's no character limit and I find myself caring less and less about likes and follows and more about being myself. I'm on a constant quest to explore perfume in more and different creative ways. In addition to writing something about my seasonal choice, I will also try to create an ambient musical piece, field recording, or drone inspired by it as well as a cut-and-paste paper collage or some other image. [this piece, I glitched a photo of nature]. I'm not saying that these are somehow really impressive pieces or that I'm some kind of artist (I'm not). They just reflect my goofy DIY sensibilities. Maybe I’m glitched!

Think of these reflections as the polar opposite of a normal fragrance Instagram post: slow, inconsistent, irregular, handmade, long, un-flashy, unpopular, unpolished, gritty, and unhashtagged. Yes, it's probably not everyone's style, but it more reflects me than the more stylized Insta.

6. What do you think? 

I know that this isn’t for everyone, but it’s something. Is it ridiculous? Is this just a long winded word bag? 

For those who like to wear a different perfume everyday, I’d love to hear about it. Is it about mood, season, vibes, aesthetic, occasion? Don’t feel like you need to justify yourself, esp. to me. I’m truly interested. I feel people like switch it up for a ton of different reasons.

7. What were your old seasonal perfumes?

Here they are in descending order. They start to trail off a bit toward the end. Check out the links to their articles, if they have them. I might go back and retroactively write some articles about some previous choices.  2025

-Fall - House of Mammoth - You and I (Will Die)

-Summer - Angelos Olfactives Creations - Angeliki (mini-Session)

-Spring - Astier de Villatte - Delhi

2024

-Winter - Papillon - Dryad

-Fall - Naomi Goodsir - Un Nuit de Bakelite

-Summer - Jo Malone - Mimosa and Cardamom

-Spring - Masque Milano - Romanza

2023

-Winter - Mallo - Arc

-Fall - Aramis - Aramis

-Summer - Puig - Agua Brava

-Spring - Dixit and Zak - Rising Mysore 3

2022

-Winter - Dixit and Zak - Emperor's Court

-Fall - Chanel - Pour Monsieur

-Summer - N/A

-Spring - Amouage - Fate Man

2021

-Winter - Francesca Bianchi - Under My Skin

-Fall - Bortnikoff - Amber Cologne

-Spring/Summer - Strangers - Aroon Sawat

——————————

(1) Pierre Vouard. The Truth about Fragrance Pricing. https://open.substack.com/pub/pierrevouard/p/the-truth-about-fragrance-pricing?r=4btyt7&utm_medium=ios; Tiff Benson. Why the Signature Scent Must Die. The Fragrance Society https://open.substack.com/pub/thefragrancesociety/p/why-the-signature-scent-myth-must?r=4btyt7&utm_medium=ios

In 1799 just outside of the city of Newburg, NY up the Hudson River, a farm laborer discovered a thigh bone of a mastodon (Mammut Americanum). After a large excavation effort paid for by the artist Charles Wilson Peale, the nearly fully recovered skeleton would later become the first mastodon displayed in the United States. Then generically called a "mammoth," which is an altogether different species, Peale's mastodon helped to put aside continental criticisms of the inferiority and degeneracy of American flora and fauna. (1)

It's unclear why House of Mammoth (HoM) chose the mammoth for its logo and name, but like Peale's mammoth (mastadon), it helps to dispel the notion that American indie perfumery is inferior to classical French perfumery. HoM is a brand that's been on my "to try" list for some time. Benjamin Esposito is the founder and perfumer for this small indie brand and they caught my eye in the sea of brands primarily because they donate portions of sales to nobile causes (such as fighting human trafficking and anti-Asian hate/ discrimination). They take the "men's grooming" sector into an honest and caring place in stark contrast to the majority of power, fight, militaristic, and man wipes misogyny-soaked copy and imagery that's currently out there. HoM products aren't necessarily masculine-coded, but I imagine that men are their main customers (at least for now). 

You and I (Will Die) 

Last month, I had the opportunity to smell one of House of Mammoth's newest creations delightfully called You and I (Will Die). Perfumer, artist, and all around generous and wise person, Donna Lipowitz made me a sample in her studio as she was helping me with a leather accord/perfume I was working on. Needless to say, I was instantly moved. 

At a recent perfume meet up, I brought perfumes that fit the theme (earthy/fruity) and ones that I've been obsessed with for the past 6 months to share with folks (Angeliki, Delhi, and now You and I (will die)). I anxiously sprayed my sample for the group. As the blotter moved around the table, I instantly saw heads nod, smiles appear, and the name being scribbled down on notepads. I knew it hit when a few minutes later I heard a notification ding as someone turned to another member on their phone and said, "Did you just buy it?" He replied, "Yep. I just bought the aftershave balm."  It was a clear table win, which is hard to pull off with such eclectic tastes. This local appeal was echoed in LA in HoM's Peoples' Choice Award win in the artisan category at the Institute of Art and Olfaction awards earlier this summer. This particular award was voted on by the attendees of the awards, not the judges.

This virality showed how such love for a beautiful perfume could spread quickly through a group of fragrance fans and it was punctuated by the fact that this was all in-person as well. No shares, likes, emojis, free bottles, reaction videos, glossy photos, and top tens were involved in this local act of discovery!

The Concept

With a name like You & I Will Die, you'd expect a long drawn out story behind the name. In its place, however, is a piece of short and sweet perfume copy. From their website:

"You & I (Will Die) is the latest perfume from House of Mammoth, an exploration of the fragile impermanence of humanity, an affirmation of life in light of death."

It continues: 

"The perfume accomplishes an extraordinary balancing act between dark and light, opening with airy vegetation and water and gradually descending into dark earth before, impossibly, becoming light, fragile, and delicate. The timeline of the wear is like a pulse, a heartbeat, a vibration, a life."

What I appreciate about the above description is that it doesn't coax you into traveling somewhere. I wonder how many perfumes are based on escape or place? It's also not trying to sell you class-hoping faux opulence or luxury, or offering vague and well-worn platitudes. And it isn't intellectually condescending. Both overly high concept and vapid commercialism in perfumery can get to be a bit much for me. Sometimes I just want a bit of intrigue but not the whole spy novel. In the same vein, I don't just want another extrait or flanker without a real reason or story, aside from making money ("Hey, buy my new thing cuz it's a new thing"). Like most perfume fans, we will form our own associations no matter the tale told to us. That's just part of the fun of perfume. For me, most (but not all) copy is just noise anyway, especially when a concept or theme feels too forced. How important is a story, theme, or concept to you? Do you need a good story or are you all about the juice or somewhere in between? Do you evaluate the smell vs. the story? As we reach peak saturation in the marketplace, I wonder if concepts will get wilder (more extreme) as brands try to distinguish themselves to consumers. 

Without being moralistic, HoM's copy reads as a subtle memento mori, a skull on the desk in the still life, if you will. It presents an open-ended jumping off point rather than a prescribed path to understanding the fragrance. While it does list notes, there aren't fantasy accords of the type that have become popular today (1). Fantasy notes can be playful and fun, especially when cautiously interspersed.

So what does this existentially named perfume smell like? 

It's hard to get your bearings in the initial blast of You and I (Will Die). Unless you looked at the notes beforehand, you wouldn't expect aldehydes. It has that waxy aldehyde that's part Clorox bleach and part floor wax. Maybe Esposito was trying to give that snuffed out candle feel, perhaps a nod to the symbol of impermanence in Dutch vanitas still lifes (closely related to the Memento Mori genre), but that's probably me overanalyzing it. These aldehydes are tempered by an aquatic note which is not usually my cup of tea, but somehow it works, both matching intensities, though the aldehydes ultimately win out.

What really characterizes You and I (Will Die) is the spiciness, from prominent in the top lingering all the way to the bottom. Here, I'm mainly talking about clove or eugenol which give this perfume an old school spicy masculine feel. It's even more interesting coming from a house steeped in grooming (soaps, brushes, aftershave, etc). It firmly stands on its own as a beautiful and interesting fragrance, but knowing this context, it could be seen as a clever take on men's idioms of the past, like an updated Bay Rum fragrance, albeit smoother, sleeker, and more complex than its Pinaud forebears.

There's also a tuft of greenness tucked underneath the aldehyde/aquatic and before the spicebox full of clove buds is fully opened. Thankfully, it doesn't scream cut green grass or crushed stems or even worse tomato leaves. I think I overdosed on green fragrances last year, so these types of modern popular signifiers of "green" can be a bit much. It might be a cautiously dosed Iso Butyl Quinoline (IBQ or similar) which provides a green ashy leather facet. At higher doses, IBQ becomes obnoxious and overbearing, but here it complements the greenness perfectly. For instance, I have trouble wearing Aramis and Cabochard due to the persistent and strong IBQ.

Finally, it lightens up to a soft resiny mossy base. The unlisted fluffy grey green oak moss (at least to me) mingles with the remaining clove and woods though it doesn't feel overly dry and dusty. In fact, to me, the smell resembles the look of oakmoss. It's a gray white tinged with a sage green, textured, but not an entirely fuzzy feel, as oak moss often elicits. There's a touch of sweetness from resins (I suspect), that rounds out the downwind spice and moss. Given the copy, I feel it nails the brief of light and darkness, moving from bright light (aldehydes and aquatic) to pitch black/brown (Spices), then finally to a dimly lit mossy cave (moss and resins). It strikes a balance between the conceptual and the wearable. For me, You and I (Will Die) only hints at the contemplative. If anything, it reminds me that my giant English will inevitably shed its leaves (along with the oak moss) and I'll have to rake up the bags and bags of it all fall and early winter long. This certainty definitely hints at the concept, but it never comes off as brooding. Perhaps, like other fragrance loves for me, its nature will become clearer as I wear it more and get to know it. If not, it's a new and interesting twist on an old classic men's genre. Not everything needs to be Kirkegaard.  

To me, there's nothing gothic or grim about this perfume, as the name might suggest. This is refreshing as I'm not expected to find something that isn't there for me. As I've said previously, intentionally witchy or gothic-themed perfumes usually fail to deliver.

My closest reference point for this perfume is the Mark Buxton-created Vetiver 46 for Le Labo and Comme des Garcons 2 Man. All three have aldehydes as well as a subtly phenolic woody/spicy feel. You and I (Will Die) came at the perfect time. I had been thinking of Bay Rum and clove / eugenol perfumes for a few months. I recently made a friend a carnation perfume, heavy on the eugenol. I don't currently own the classic, Virgin Island Bay Rum by Pinaud, but you bet that I'll be getting it once my aftershave runs out.

New Ways to Enjoy Perfume

I'm constantly searching for ways to rethink my appreciation for fragrance. Instead of buying the perfume right away like I desperately wanted to (and eventually will), I fought my urge and bought this scent as an aftershave (along with some other perfume samples from the brand). Perhaps, it's related to my recent barbershop nostalgia trip (see my previous piece on Canoe) or my hesitance to add yet more bottles to my collection, but ultimately I wanted to enjoy this beautiful scent in a completely different way. The clovey eugenol and aldehydes, I thought, would be excellent for a bracing post shave. In fact, the bottle has a sticker that reads point blank, "this is not a cool splash."

At this point, you're probably yawning and saying, yes, yes, we know about functional products (soaps, aftershave, lotion, hair mists, room spray, diffusers, etc), but this is relatively new to me. Despite my love for perfume, I don't do a ton of niche or luxury scented products, mainly due to their cost. I usually want to spend my perfume budget on perfume, not hair mist or room spray. I usually use less scented products so that my perfume stands out. My shaving routine (if you really want to know) is a cake of shaving soap (usually a gift, most recently Floris Sandalwood), and witch hazel with frankincense EO in it for aftershave. My deodorant is a light lavender (Tom's I think), I burn inexpensive Japanese incense (Shoyeido), and I usually use Dr. Bronners soap (though I do get nice bar soap as gifts). Again, one more example of how I am not a social media-ready personality. I don't have new products to shout about. 

Want to know more about HoM? Here's an interview with Ben Esposito by the wonderful I Sniff before I Sleep. House of Mammoth Fragrances - I Sniff Before I Sleep

As a reward/punishment for making it this far, here’s my drone for You and I (Will Die). I called it Inevitability.

_______

(1) I heard about this event from the book American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic. If you like botany, you'll dig this book. Hosack has a lot of tie ins with Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, Peale and other early American luminaries.

(2) Notes: aldehydes, weedy herbs, watery florals, jasmine grandiflorum, carrot seed, leather, smoke-tinged wood, Haitian vetiver, patchouli absolute, truffle, violet leaf, fragile musk.

We can’t escape nostalgia these days. From films to music and from fashion to politics, we are constantly bombarded with nostalgic images and sounds so much so that we probably don't even realize it. Some of this media is part of a well-established creative cycle of borrowing, renewing, revisiting, and conversing with the past. Here, I’m mainly thinking of music and fashion where remix has been a tried-and-true method of (re)creation for years. For other types of media, such as mainstream movies, nostalgia can be a cash cow for aging Gen X audiences wanting to return to a forgotten childhood of little-to-no parental supervision. As a result, we’re served up lackluster reboot after reboot of classic 1980s movies without much comment or question.

In its worst political manifestation, however, nostalgia becomes an ideological program to obscure racist, sexist, and fascist designs. We are told to revisit a certain time period where we (or one segment of the population) were “great.” This modern yearned-for-past often vastly differs from any real lived experience. Rose-colored glasses take a complex past and essentialize, flatten, and trim it to fit modern nefarious uses. 

For many today, Canoe by Dana and other barbershop fougeres like it are seen as nostalgic perfumes (1). For proof, one has simply to look at fragrance review sites. One reviewer on Fragrantica called Canoe very succinctly "Nostalgia in a bottle" (2). Yet, Canoe is not gobbled up the way that superhero movies are. As generic yet stronger woody ambers became more and more popular, Canoe has been left in the dust. It is viewed by enthusiasts and commoners alike as a well-worn dad and boomer-cologne. It’s patently unhip, old, and not the type of "cool" old (say like a vintage pair of Levi's) mainly because Canoe is still in production and relatively accessible, even in deeper vintage. JJ Colbourne likens it to Rodney Dangerfield in that Canoe "gets no respect" and I think he's absolutely right (3). While Canoe is a favorite of YouTube roundup lists of "cheap drugstore classics," this descriptor is a bit of a misnomer these days, well at least the "drugstore" part as there are very few drug stores around anymore (at least in America) and even fewer where I've seen Canoe stocked on the shelves. This should be more appropriately but unsentimentally labeled a "Walmart classic" or "Amazon classic." 

History

Despite its pedestrian and bland nostalgic connotations these days, Canoe has a fascinating history. It was created in 1935 for the Spanish brand, Dana, by the legendary Givaudan perfumer, Jean Carles (4). Fleeing their new headquarters in Paris due to the war, Dana then set up shop in the United States in 1940. The Dana website says that soldiers brought Canoe back from World War II, though this might be more masculine marketing lore than reality. What is more interesting about Canoe is that it was originally marketed to women as a kind of lighter counterpart to Dana's earlier darker hit, Tabu (1932). Sometime in the 1950s or 1960s (at least as far as I can tell), Dana started marketing Canoe to men (American men primarily), and it has been a gendered men’s fragrance ever since. 

Pronunciation and Spelling

A note on spelling and pronunciation: For consistency purposes, and as an American, I pronounce Canoe like the rowed boat instead of the French "Can-Oh-Ah." Yes, I know this is in print and it doesn't matter, but I feel like it's important. Additionally, I've been searching for proof of umlauts and accents in packaging and spelling that some have mentioned, but have yet to find it. For reference, a French print ad from the 1950s had no umlaut or accent grave. If anyone has a definitive source, either way, I'd love to see or know about it.

Canoe and its Children (discontents)

Canoe is built on the common fougere structure of citrus, lavender, coumarin, and moss. Brian Buchanan hints that the later and admittedly more popular Brut was built on the slightly older Canoe formula. To me, Canoe is characterized by the soft powderiness of the vanilla/coumarin and a doughy heliotrope. It contains less of Brut's dank musky green attack. To me, Brut is sharper and more assertive. Coupled with a stronger name and scent, Brut won out in the masculine popularity contest.

A few years ago, I became enamored by Chanel's Boy, a part of the Les Exclusifs collection. I loved its softness and the powdery notes with moss and lavender poking through just enough to add interest. This session, it turns out, must have been a subconscious nostalgic return to Canoe as the two share some definite similarities, especially in the opening. It shows that I'm not somehow above the nostalgia trap. Boy too is a soft heliotrope, lemon, lavender, and geranium fougere marketed to both men and women. Boy, however, is seen as a more refined and acceptable soft fougere to many fragrance fans. Its vanilla is tempered and it possesses a subtle floral fruitiness to render it more modern. It's just different enough and it doesn't hurt to have a Chanel label on the bottle. Not that it means anything, but Fragrantica users have not listed these two in each others' "smells like" sections.

Canoe has almost always been available in splash form. I'm not above trying to rip apart fragrances to understand them so I decanted some of my vintage 1970s version into a spray bottle and as a result, discovered an entirely different perfume. The atomized Canoe skewed deeper and more mossy; it almost had a leathery quality, though this might be the tonka if I had to guess. Truth be told, I prefer the top note-focused splash application though I'm not like others who like to splash it on with wild abandon due to its low cost and limited longevity. Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I actually enjoyed the softer and ephemeral nature of this classic.  

Herbal Tonic Quackery

I've always thought that there's something herbal tonic-like about Canoe. Perhaps, the suggestion came from other bric-a-brac that we had in our bathroom cabinet, such as empty bottles of the late 1800s and early 1900s patent medicines. One such bottle was a "celery tonic," that I always thought was interesting. Though 30 years separates the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act (which put an end to many patent medicines) and Canoe's release, its top notes of lemon, bent by the herbal lavender, and clary sage are inextricably linked at least in my mind to that feel of early liquid quackery. Would this cure rheumatism? What about catarrh? Would I get a free musical show with the pitch? Would I drink this and convalesce in a deck chair with a blanket on my lap in some seaside sanitarium? Not sure, but nothing that I've smelled since has this medicinal yet drinkable feel. 

Canoe and Class

It's interesting to think that there was a time when Canoe signaled "sophistication" or "upscale," or "refinement" (5). When I first encountered it in the late 1980s and 1990s, however, it was squarely downmarket and stripped of any of its previous upper class sailing associations though it kept the semaphores. My dad was/is not fancy or upscale in the least. Canoe merely formed part of his standard men's "cologne" canon of British Sterling (also Dana), Old Spice (also originally marketed to women), Brut (based on Canoe), and Skin Bracer (cue the Jack Palance commercial). Ultimately, Canoe's ubiquitousness has contributed to its lack of value among fragrance enthusiasts today; it's almost as if it were guilty by association, which is too bad as it shines above the rest in my opinion. When luxury niche perfumes routinely set you back $300 or more, it's nice to know that quality can still be had for less than $30. I do wonder, however, what will happen to Canoe when boomers age out. Will anyone still buy Canoe?

Rural Barbershop

Like many, Conoe's contrast of lavender-meets-vanilla-meets-moss reminds me of old barbershops, something I remember fondly but not uncritically (6). The first barber that I remember going to had a nickname that I later learned was "the Butcher” and I have to say, it was extremely apt. He gave the worst haircuts at least for younger kids though I imagine he was partially skilled at trimming the wisps of a balding man’s hair or feathery hair styles popular in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the epitome of small town and rural barbers: the blue disinfectant jar for combs and scissors, the deer antler trophies, various taxidermied animals, hunting and sports magazines, tall brass ashtray stands, and the just-out-of-reach nudie magazines. 

I don’t yearn for shitty haircuts, suffocating cigarette smoke, playboy magazines, and mindnumbing hunting talk about who shot what, when, and where, but what the Butcher would splash on me at the end of a cut was or least was very similar to Canoe. It was characterized by the powdery vanillic lavender. It was less abrasive than Brut or other more aggressive fougeres of the time. No matter my age and the horrible massacre of my hair, I always walked away with a powdery, vanillic, lavender and mossy smell that would last most of the day and signaled "haircut" to me. It was so powdery that I thought for years that he actually put on some kind of scented talcum powder or that it was infused into the ribbon that was put around my neck under the cape before I went under the sheep shears, I mean scissors. 

These typically masculine third spaces are prone to nostalgic glances in the fragrance community where barbershop fougere is bandied around routinely. I remember seeing a tweet year’s ago from the loser architect of the anti-critical race theory (I’m not going to name him or screenshot it because he’s such an asshat and I can't find it). Anyway, he tweeted out a hyper imagined-nostalgic tweet about barbershops and male comradery without women and where men were men, and traditional values reigned supreme. It was so saccharine sweet, patently stupid, and out of touch. It would have made Norman Rockwell throw up in his mouth. He was dragged for days and rightfully so. It was basically a cable access advert for the men’s rights movement, something that we unfortunately see all too often these days. Even as I outlived my small hometown in many ways, they simply would have beat the hell out of turds like him even if he did match their political affiliations. The politics of hair, even white male rural hair like mine, was complicated. Like most others in the 1980s and 1990s, I also got my hair cut by female hairdressers in beauty salons and by semi-skilled neighbors. I gave myself DIY mohawks and sought out barbered sculpted flattops. It was significantly more equal opportunity than the version we're often fed (or choose to remember). 

Bottle Design

As others have mentioned, Canoe possesses a satisfying bottle design and feel that even as a child I could appreciate. It was round-bottomed, tapering slowly, and culminated in a white sailor's cap (or beret), though it probably wasn't an intentional nautical nod. As John Beibel states in his fragrantica article on Canoe, the semaphore nautical flags spell out C-A-N-O-E, something that I never registered (7). In design terms, it dwarfed its medicine cabinet competitors in my house, the plastic bottle of Brut and the tarnished and gummy British Sterling. It's funny how texture affected my early impressions. Brut WAS green and plastic smelling and British Sterling WAS metallic and sharp. Canoe though, Canoe was smooth. It was light and airy though it still had a subtly sharper edge, but these edges were lemon lacquered. 

Fragrance Nostalgia and Future Nostalgia

I wonder just how many daily Canoe wearers there are out there still, getting the gift sets for Christmas or father's day. Even as a fragrance enthusiast who focuses on one perfume for a few months (we're a rare breed), Canoe will never unfortunatley make its way into my rotation. There are so many perfumes and so little time. Since I don't consider myself a perfume collector, I'm not too worried about getting deeper vintages or scouring ebay for unopened bottles. I will wear it, though it probably won't be for sentimental reasons. Hopefully, I have offloaded most of those overly nostalgic thoughts here (sorry). More than likely, I'll reach for it when I'm looking for a classic soft fougere reference or a particular note or material.

When my own kids remember perfumes, it won't be Canoe. They are forming their own weird scent memories of what my wife and I wear or smell like. Due to the proliferation of new perfume releases, will there be people on fragrance review sites in 40 years waxing nostalgic about their parents' or grandparents' perfumes like they are about Canoe? Will there be the same type of commonality that there was for the last 90 years? Will they look back on Santal 33, BR540, Aventus, Sauvage, and so on as nostalgically as we do about our dad's barbershop fougeres or our mom's 1970s chypres? We seem to think that we might have the market cornered for sentimentality and beautiful perfumes.

What are your nostalgic perfumes? Do you fragrance folks who don't have a recognizable signature scent worry that your kids or people won't associate you with a certain fragrance the way that some do with Canoe or Shalimar or No. 5?

Also, I chopped up the Canoe commercials and made an ambient drone piece with a new phone sampling app I just got. Check it out here.

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(1) After a brief makeshift content analysis of Fragrantica reviews of Canoe, 33 of the 109 reviews (30% of total) contained a nostalgia-inflected review or comment.

(2) CoC077. "review of Canoe" Canoe Dana cologne - a fragrance for men 1936

(3) alphairone. "review of Canoe" Canoe Dana cologne - a fragrance for men 1936

(4) https://danaclassics.com/pages/canoe. Fragrantica says 1936 as the release date, though the website says 1935. Jean Carles was behind the wonderful Miss Dior, Shocking, Ma Griffe, and Tabu. For many perfumers or wannabes (me), his "method" would be familiar. 

(5) See the Scented Devil's excellent take on Canoe and its upper class beginnings. https://varanisridari.home.blog/2019/11/10/canoe-by-dana-1936/. 

(6) There are 40 mentions (out of +/-109 total) of "Barber" in the Canoe review for this in Fragrantica.

(7)  John Beibel. The Secret Treasure of Canoe https://www.fragrantica.com/news/The-Secret-Treasure-of-Canoe-18810.html

Sometimes your favorite perfumes come into your life by complete chance and not by a methodical chosen sample set, a subtle or not so subtle nudge by an Instagramer, or as often the case for me, a rabid note or material hunt (see narcissus, mimosa, and more recently, blue lotus).

Angelos Creations Olfactives’s Angeliki came to me in a little velvet bag of premium artisanal perfume samples that a friend didn't like and graciously passed on. I had only seen the brand previously from their Lucky Scent profile. The bottles were chic and small (30 ml). The style was refined and not a gilded package monster. They appeared simple and elegant, bearing the cursive logo stretched across the front.

I came to learn that the Greek owner and perfumer, Angelos Balamis, was previously a YouTube perfume reviewer. This always sends up instant red flags, which is a bit unfair as there are some good examples of reviewer turned brand owner/perfumer (Les Abstraits to name just one). He started perfuming in 2014, says his website and it looks like he launched his first perfume in 2018, so I felt relieved that it probably wasn’t a venture capitalist cash grab brand of the post pandemic perfume era (P.P.P.E). Another reassuring indicator is that he identifies as indie and not “luxury niche.”

His perfume, Angeliki, is a tribute to his grandmother, Angeliki or Αγγελική in Greek, which is one of the sweetest things a perfumer can do and an opportunity normally afforded only to indie perfumers. See James from Filigree and Shadow's lineup for other equally meaningful and beautiful dedication perfumes. Angeliki, the woman, lived to 104 years of age and each May 21 (her birthday), Balamis releases 104 bottles in her honor. I was lucky enough to snag #18 of 104 this year.

Here are the notes for Angeliki from the website:

Tête: Apricot, Pomelo (Corse), Bergamote (Calabria), Black Pepper (Madagascar), Aldehydes.

Cœur: Wisteria, Freesia, Lilac, Jasminum Grandiflorum Absolute (Egypt), Rose Damascena Absolute (Turkey), Muguet, Rosewood (Brasil), Oakwood, Carnation.

Fond: Oakmoss Absolute, Musk, Castoreum (Reco.), Civet (Synthetic), Buddha Wood (Australia), Black Sacra (Oman), Agarwood (Malaysia), Beeswax Absolute (Laos), Ambrette Seed Oil (Peru), Tonka Beans Tincture, Benzoin (Siam), Tolu Balsam, Opoponax Oil (Ethiopia), Patchouli EO & Absolute, Labdanum Absolute (Spain), Santalum Spicatum (Australia), Santalum Album (East India).

From this extensive shopping list, it’s clear that he prizes premium materials and provides provenance information, either for transparency or a low key boast or maybe both. It’s also clear from the freesia, wisteria, muguet, and lilac that he uses mixed media, as those plants do not lend themselves to extraction or at least easily and economically.

Angeliki could go in any number of different directions based on these notes alone. If I could only choose four words to describe this perfume, it would be: Big Floral Retro Chypre.

This perfume took me to not a grandmother, but to a great aunt. My Aunt Bernie (I never used "great") was my grandmother's sister and someone who I didn't know all that well. Perhaps this makes it easier to essentialize and easily pair with a perfume. My maternal grandmother died when I was young so Bernie and one other aunt stood in for her at least in my little mind. This perfume encompasses everything about her. As a smoker, Aunt Bernie smelled of cigarettes and perfume, two potent ingredients of a deep long-term scent memory. Similarly, Angeliki is smoky, but not in that modern phenolic forest fire or hickory smoked bacon way. It's also not ashy in that vintage Cabochard way either. That is, I don't sense the isobutyl quinoline that the perfumer Bernard Chant loved so much. Instead, Angeliki has a stuffiness that I associate with someone who wears perfume to cover up smoking. The cigarettes and smoke are backgrounded, perhaps the 1:00 pm smell of a 10:00 am cigarette break. Like Bernie, Angeliki has a jovial husky smoker's voice. There's no daintiness to this fragrance. The lily of the valley and other spring florals that I get are not a forest nymph romp in the dew-dropped grass; it's more like a quick nod to Miss Dior before moving on to thicker things. Yet the florals do not feel hastily thrown together or needlessly dense, like something an amatuer would make (ahem like me). Most are indistinguishable if taken separately, but all together also add a touch of freshness to this primarily stuffy-in-a-good way perfume. The rose, while listed, seems lost, but I often find that when using natural rose materials it simply adds a touch of fruitiness and less of a "hey, it's a sharp rose" in a floral mix. Along with the apricot and touch of freesia, the fruit-laced rose helps to balance the white florals. To me, the muguet and jasmine fight for prominence depending on the day. When I first smelled it months ago, I was convinced that it contained jasmine sambac due to the indolic buzz it creates. Now, all I smell is a muguet tinged heart with a round lilac. Lilac always takes the sharp astringency and blunts it in the nicest of ways. If this is any indication, I suspect all the florals will make an appearance as I get to know this better.

Angeliki has a distinct retro feel, as did Bernie and my entire crumbling extractive resource-based hometown. She seemed like she was permanently stuck in the early to mid-1970s. Even if you don't find your own 1960s or 1970s reference with this perfume, you can admit that it doesn't belong to this day and age. The fillers and stretchers that create a nearly transparent feel are nowhere to be found here. The modern notion that one needs to smell every note listed (and clearly) dies a quick death in Angeliki. This ties it even closer to the vintages of the past where it was less about "here's jasmine, here's rose" and more about the overall effect.

Sometimes cultural revivalists create art that is in direct conversation/confrontation with the past. These artists seem to build vividly retro reflections, as if to distill the past down to its essence and in turn flatten the anachronistic rough spots. Angeliki does that, but it doesn't feel like it's trying to outdo the big chypres of the 1960s and 1970s. One the contrary, Balamis seems to tap into a generalized vintage perfume current while avoiding any specific location or time. Whereas Papillon's Dryad seems to outdo Vol de Nuit (in my opinion), Angeliki doesn't have a ready point of challenge. It's vaguely and gauzily 1960s and 1970s, as if the techs at the Sears Portrait studio blurred the edges of this perfume as it looks over its shoulder into the distant future. It almost feels like Angeliki rushed headlong through time grabbing parts of classic perfumery: oak moss and subtle diffusive fruit from the Rochas Femme and Mitsouko, suffocating amber and semi-skank from Tabu and Youth Dew, lily of the valley from the 1960s Diors, before stopping at the ingredient-obsessed artisans of today to grab a handful of oud and expensive base materials.

The rest of the similarities between person and perfume fade into vague associations and impressions. From her burnt umber-hued clothing to the piled up dyed bouffant black hair that showed its true color at the roots, Bernie and Angeliki, the perfume, both seem to have an autumnal color palette. Bernie didn't have much money, but was always put together and respectable. It was clear that she put thought into her appearance and there was a certain downhome glamour about her. Angeliki, on the other hand, has this in spades. Angeliki exudes a classiness or maybe cosmopolitanism that didn't really exist in my hometown. Unfortunately, I don't think that I can associate Bernie with one certain vintage perfume, that is, I couldn't pick it out of a perfumed police line up, as Jaimie Q did with Youth Dew (see the first issue of the Scent Strip), but it’s more of an overall vintage feel that I remember.

What strikes me most about Angeliki is its invitation for closeness. It brings you in. That’s not to say that it’s a snuggly musk skin scent. At 25% concentration and an even more potent "feel," it’s one of the biggest fragrances I own. I often complain about the tightness of higher concentration perfumes and advocate for space or just a hint of transparency. For Angeliki, though, this tightness works in its favor to create a warmth, made more for furs and nights in the city and less for turning up to steno pool day job with a Champagne hangover. While I usually avoid gendered language and impressions, these images are hard to separate from the perfumer’s intention. This perfume is the literal epitome of a "grandma scent." More than a few fragrance enthusiasts (not just men) will turn up their noses at this one for its dense florals or classic chypre structure. It will be too classically French for the exotic material folks, oud heads, and eastern perfume lovers. It will be too old school for the new vanilla gourmand gang. It will be too tame for the modern experimental creatives and probably too new for the vintage folks. I don't quite fit into any of these categories or at least neatly.

Papillon and Rogue have mastered this revisionist style of perfume, creating carefully layered and beautiful perfumes while avoiding cheap gimmicks and trends. Angelos Creative Olfactives is right at home in this world. Balamis is committed to reimagining classic perfumery just as much as I am committed to seeking it out. Angeliki will not move everyone like it did me, but I think people will still be able to appreciate this well constructed perfume that skillfully looks to the past not to copy a specific perfume, but to inhabit a composition approach or philosophy of a bygone era.

NB: for those who saw the beautiful first issue of the Scent Strip, this is anonymous perfume listed in the missed connections section.

Ok, I said I was getting away from hyper focusing on singular notes, but this one is different; hear me out. Blue lotus seems to be a deep cut type of material in perfumery. Outside of perfumery proper, blue lotus is everywhere. Just do a search for blue lotus essential oil and you’ll come up with scores of dubious headshop looking bottles for dirt cheap promising any number of things from a restful sleep to hallucinations. Interestingly enough, the actual plant itself does have psychoactive properties and it has a long history of use in Ancient Egypt.* Researchers found blue lotus leaves covering King Tut when they opened his sarcophagus in the 1920s. Ancient Egyptian art is filled with references or depictions of lotus, perhaps attesting to its spiritual or functional importance. In fact, if you look at aerial views of the Nile which include its delta, it even resembles the depictions of lotus from Egyptian art and manuscripts. Feel free to insert your own batshit theory about ancient aliens.

Though it’s tempting to think that the island of the lotus eaters mentioned in the Odyssey refers to this plant, it doesn’t seem to be the case as it instead refers to a fruiting tree and not a water lily. It’s due to this ancient Egyptian link that you’ll see lotus on copy and product names in just about any metaphysical store. A lot of what is sold is simply dyed non-hallucinogenic lotus and not true blue lotus (Nymphaea nouchali var. caerule).

I thought I’d explore how blue lotus has been incorporated into artisanal perfumery. I say artisanal because using real blue lotus isn’t really scalable or feasible for mass market brands. So Chanel or Hermes are not putting this material into their creations. For reference, 5 ml of Blue Lotus absolute will set you back $165 from Mandy Aftel’s website and I couldn’t actually source it through any other reputable sellers. As the old adage goes “if it’s too good to be true, it usually is.” So it goes for shopping for blue lotus. Though it’s not common as a mass market note or more likely as an aroma chemical accord, it’s not unheard of. I haven’t actually smelled any of these, though I more commonly see “lotus” sans blue as a note.

If I were to make a blue lotus accord off the top of my head, I might employ a light or diluted muguet material or maybe even tuberose absolute, something from the violet family (maybe Alpha Ionone) for a chalky floral fruitiness, ginger, floralozone for wateriness, a drop of pink lotus absolute for a realistic touch (since I own some), and an even smaller dash of C12 MNA for that added dusty aspect. Additionally, other natural lotus varieties are much more commonly used and available in perfumery. Eden Botanicals sells both pink lotus absolute (1 ml/$20) and white lotus absolute (1 ml/$20) which is not necessarily economical but half the cost of its blue counterpart. The ones I've chosen below are highlighted for their inclusion of the real thing, which on its own is a dusty, fruity, powdery, and almost bubble gum-like material.

TRNP

Teone Reinthal is an all-natural perfumer from Australia. Her perfumes are exceptional or at least the ones that I’ve tried so far. Many are discontinued as the two listed here are. Just as I slowly fall for one, it becomes unavailable. As a hesitant blind buyer and notorious “slow to warm” type of person, I’m always missing out on her fragrances. She has two perfumes that feature blue lotus that I’ve tried, Blue Lotus and Nefertum.

Blue Lotus

A big indolic ylang ylang starts the show with slight banana facets typical of ylang ylang. There’s also a green minty quality that gives the opening an aromatic and open feel. Despite this normally dense floral, it has a lightness that we won’t really see in the others below and rarely ever from ylang ylang-centric perfumes. There’s just a hint of spiciness that adds interest but doesn’t completely shift the floral focus. While ylang ylang isn’t technically a white floral, this creation easily fits into the gardenia and jasmine family of white florals though it doesn’t come off as necessarily tropical or overly suffocating as white florals can often be. To me, ylang ylang, gardenia, and tuberose all have a background birch-like (almost camphor) facet that I absolutely love, but sometimes clashes in compositions. The ylang ylang dances dangerously close to this line, but the greener and spicier elements (that almost verge on ginger) help to diffuse it. The spicy minty floral then gives way to the pink powdery blue lotus material. As a perfume material, blue lotus seems to create an unavoidable powdery opaque horizontal layer in a similar way that violet or orris does. It spreads across a perfume horizontally and slows down its steady flow, just as the cataracts of the Nile do. Unlike the Nile, it never picks up the speed and power that it had in the beginning.

This all-natural creation stays relatively soft throughout and dries down to her characteristic sandalwood, patchouli, and vanilla/amber mixture, or at least that’s what I perceive. Whatever it is, it’s absolutely lovely and one I’ve tried to recreate with absolutely no luck. It’s creamy, powdery, floral, resinous, woody, and takes its cues from vintage ambers, but is something distinctively new and completely hers. It might simply be due to the remnants of the powdery blue lotus meeting the sweet resinous base. What I really appreciate is her ability to take a semi-sweet base and make it palatable to people like me who recoil from most sweet scents.

Overall, Blue Lotus feels more expansive and less resinous and direct compared to Nefertum (below). Despite the ylang ylang, it doesn’t feel overly tropical and humid. There is also a curious amount of space in this perfume, a skillful nod to Reinthal as natural perfumes are not generally known for their airiness.

Nefertum

Named after the god who is commonly depicted in paintings and sculpture with a blue lotus headdress or one positioned directly above him, Nefertum is also the god of perfumes. These are some big shoes to fill, but Reinthal doesn’t shrink from the challenge. Nefertum takes a spicier path to blue lotus than her own Blue Lotus discussed above. I get cinnamon, saffron, and maybe a hint of cardamom. Usually spices affect the temperature of a fragrance, creating a warm or a cool atmosphere. Here, Nefertum leans on the warmer end of the thermometer, due to the prominent but restrained cinnamon.

Quickly the chalky candied blue lotus appears and turns the whole perfume into a sweet dusty mat. Not surprisingly, Nefertum is much sweeter and resinous than Blue Lotus. Calling it an amber is a bit of a misnomer though as it's miles away from say, Serge Lutens Ambre Sultan or any of the newer, thinner, but stronger ambers. It has more in common with vintage ambers, where the accord plays a minor role in a fragrance.

Before realizing that it contained blue lotus, I pictured this perfume in terms of color as a kind of red-tinged pink and that association is hard to shake and highlights the misnomer from actual flower color (electric blue) to the absolute’s scent or impression to me (dusty pink).

Reinthal has such a phenomenal grasp on creating solid and beautiful dry downs. I’d love to know how she builds up her sandalwood-resinous-centric bases. She smartly uses the sweetness in the base to extend the powdery blue lotus in the mid. When vanillas drift too far away from their amber accord roots, they often lose their amber identity. Nefertum’s vanilla stays firmly within the accord and avoids becoming overly cloying, maintaining its balance. To me, this perfume is the epitome of the Egyptian concept of Ma’at (balance, harmony, justice, and order). As a goddess, Ma’at might be better suited as a modern patron of perfumers or at least to me personally. I’m constantly striving to create balance and harmony out of all of the chaos in my own creations. Currently, it's mostly chaos. The scents that embrace balance and harmony are the ones that I come back to and enjoy the most.

After testing and retesting these TRNP perfumes, one thing becomes clear: These are made to be tested on the skin. From the strip, these perfumes, while still beautiful, only tell half of their tale. It’s a constant reminder to slow down and think about perfumes. The scent strip can be a good first draft of an impression in your mind, but shouldn’t be your final say, especially for perfumes that you enjoy and are not outright scrubbers. I fully admit that I’m prone to rushing through samples and thinking of perfume as “content” at times, something to be consumed.

Ensar Oud - Blue Kalbar

Blue Kalbar was my first exposure to blue lotus as a material in a perfume, well in an attar in this case. Ensar prides himself on finding exotic materials, so it’s only natural that he would try his hand at incorporating this rare ingredient. As he often does, he includes provenance on his blue lotus, which he states comes from “across Thailand.” I’m not exactly sure what “Kalbar” means, but it could be a portmanteau of the Kalimantan Barat (in West Kalimantan province of the Island of Borneo in Indonesia).

In Blue Kalbar, Ensar seems to embrace the cooler side of this material as a theme bringing in a noticeable oceanic Sri Lankan oud as well as ambergris. Other materials, however, are less evocative of this salt spray theme. He lists mimosa, kewda (screw pine), blue cypress, Mysore Sandalwood (most likely the carrier used), frangipani, Nagaland oud, and orange blossom in his description.

The overall effect of the attar is less electric blue present in the saturated photos and his copy and more of a breezy watery green, almost like a stagnant pond meets the saline ocean. The blue lotus comes off stemmy and subtly minty along with the characteristic floral powder puff, but here tinted green. What is lacking here is the overwhelming candied floral-like sweetness of TRNP’s offerings above and Aftelier’s chalky lotus creation (see below). This attar initially skewed my impression of lotus as a material on its own. I was later surprised after smelling the TRNPs that blue lotus could be so sweet and powdery. Hat’s off to Ensar who has successfully shifted the color impression of this perfume to green (closer to blue) and away from pink.

It’s clear that there is plenty of blue lotus in Blue Kalbar, but he’s skillfully overlaid it with such a verdant leafy/stemmy effect that he rips you from the blooming flower and dunks you deep into the water to gaze at the deep roots and floating leaves of the lotus plant above. While he doesn’t explicitly say what he’s aiming for, the result is an interesting take on the whole plant. For those who like interesting green fragrances (me) and with money to burn (not me), this is something to seek out. I'm not going to lie, this perfume took me a while to thoroughly appreciate. It was too rooty and powdery green for me when I first got the sample. This attar has a pricey perfume version, but I have not tried it. If it’s anything like the attar, it will be stunning.

Aftelier - Sacré Bleu

Mandy Aftel, the queen of natural perfumery also has a blue lotus fragrance. I think not only is sourcing a big challenge, but perhaps working with it remains difficult. This list is filled with heavyweights and more skilled naturalistas. Sacré Bleu starts with a chalky and almost candied violet along with something indolic or even animalic, perhaps the ambergris reaching through from the base. A polleny mimosa is present to my nose as well, but doesn’t overwhelm. Here, it vaguely reminds me of one of my favorite perfumes, Koh-I-Noor by Areej Le Doré. It’s a violet that’s verging on waxy that brings this discontinued personal favorite to mind.

There’s a floral that’s creating dissonance in a similar way that jasmine sambac does in many of Parfum Dusita’s fragrances. And like the Dusita creations, the dissonance never slows down the flow of Sacré Bleu. Instead of stealing the show, the blue lotus simply adds to this violet ensemble. She’s using the lotus to increase and build this candied violet feel. While lotus seems to be the focal point of the concept (name and copy), Sacré Bleu demonstrates just how difficult it is to truly highlight this material. It’s on stage, but not belting out the aria. Instead, it's lurking in the wings providing the vivid powdery scenery.

I don’t sense all of the materials all at once as I do with a lot of other all natural creations. It’s a relatively slow unfolding, but primarily the violet-tinged blue lotus hangs about for the majority of the wear.

Like Ensar, Aftel also adds premium supporting materials such as Mysore Sandalwood and ambergris. These seem similar to some of the notes of Blue Kalbar above, but the two could not be more different. Kalbar could almost be mistaken for a watery fig while Sacré Bleu could be a vintage violet with a slight amber animalic touch. As we've seen above, amber is a natural partner that seems to bolster and extend the precious lotus.

Filigree & Shadow - Kiyoti

As I tell people, this local-to-me brand has something for everyone. The perfumer, James Eliot, is nothing short of a creative juggernaut and friendly and generous to boot. I always walk in the studio with a firm idea of what I want and then walk out with something completely different. So was the case with Kiyoti which was an early creation and is alcohol-based instead of his more characteristic water-based perfumes. After smelling nearly everything in his shop, I was blown away with its dusty amber lotus and the real oud in the dry down. Yes, I stayed that long. In Ensar’s hands, this perfume would list for well over $300 and more for an extrait. Eliot told me that he used white lotus and blue in the opening. I suspect that it’s a good way to extend the pricey blue lotus with a less pricey material.

Filigree and Shadow uses the common lotus-amber pairing, but it morphs into something greener than the others, with the exception of Blue Kalbar. Where Blue Kalbar's green is fresh, Kiyoti's seems bound for the compost bin, revealing more of the decay. He employs ginger or galangal to play up the subtle rootiness of the lotus. I’ve used ginger in my own creations with pink lotus, so it’s clear that I’m aping from the best. While TPNR uses cinnamon (and other spices) to complement the resins, Filigree and Shadow also uses a touch of warm spices, but instead bends Kiyoti greenward. This makes Kiyoti the most noticeably vegetal of the bunch. He puts you in a stagnant pond.

Kiyoti also has a petrol type of note in the opening, placing you in the powdery green pond with an oil slick coating the top. This might be the oud reaching through from the base. Sometimes, you can sense the sharp fermented aspects of oud early on while leaving the resiny tobacco aspects for the dry down. Once you get there, you're rewarded by a lovely real oud that has some remnants of the amber materials which give it a little bit of sweetness, but not nearly that of the TRNP offerings. This is the most accessible and structured lotus in the batch.

Charenton Macerations - Eye, Hatshepsut

This was a late entry sample from the Lucky Scent catalog and perhaps the perfume with the most intentional link to ancient Egypt in name and design. It starts with a blast of what feels like lily of the valley materials, taking it in the white floral direction. It verges on an acetone-like sharpness. Here, it has more in common with the modern astringent spring fragrances than those that employ the pricey blue lotus material in any noticeable amount as the perfumes above do.

This intense floral note progresses to a green spicy, almost gingery feel. I recently added ginger to a lotus accord when I was trying to build up and amplify real pink lotus material. I think it works here, but Eye, Hatshepsut ultlimately seems out of balance. This accord could have done with a softer touch and maybe more spice to temper the harshness of the overbearing white floral material.

This angular and sharp top eventually fades to a subtly powdery mid. Here, it starts to approach the gentle sweetness of the others. It’s a giant sigh of relief from the pharaonic top. The base materials also come into view, predominantly labdanum, and round the perfume nicely.

It’s by far the most mass appealing of the bunch, but the outlier in that I wouldn’t associate it with blue lotus if sniffed blindly. I feel the perfumer was going for that transparent watery lotus that sometimes pops up in mainstream perfumes (see Un Jardin sur la Nil by Hermes). While I’m not against these types of takes on lotus, Eye, Hatshepsut ultimately fails to take me anywhere and lacks the unique powdery bubblegum feel that I’ve come to appreciate and the others clearly possess.

Conclusion

Blue Lotus is a material that everyone desperately wants to make a star, either to link it to an Egyptian theme or that of scarcity, but it will never quite make it alone. It’s probably cliche to say that it’s elusive, but due to the nature, scarcity, and the cost of this material, I think the label is warranted.

I’d love to explore aroma chemical blue lotus accords though like their familiar oud cousin, I imagine it’s hard to completely capture its complexity. That, coupled with a general inexperience with the real thing among the buying public, will always be more of a fantasy accord, more perception and marketing than mass spectrometric reality.

So what version of blue lotus do I like the most? The literal powdery bubblegum material, the impression of water and the electric blue of the flower, or some other fantastical element of this material? I’m not sure I have a good answer to this question. Each of the above have their own approach, strenghts, and overall feel. I do feel that amber plays well with the blue lotus and I like touches of green that hint at the leaves and roots of this rare water plant. I like the link to Ancient Egypt in copy, concept, and inspiration, but I’m much more moved by a beautfiully composed scent than I am to exoticism. Luckily, the above perfumes do this pricey material justice. Unlike Western church incense perfumes (CdG’s Avignon and its numerous children), a uniform “style” hasn’t really emerged for blue lotus allowing a little more creativity. I’d like to see others use this material if it becomes a little more economically feasible/sustainable. I feel like Antonio Gardoni of Bogue could create an really interesting take on this material. He has some lovely layered bubble gum jasmine/tuberose creations already.

Have you tried any perfumes that feature blue lotus, either the real material or an accord? I’d love to hear about it.

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* Article https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/03/11/investigating-the-psychedelic-blue-lotus-of-egypt-where-ancient-magic-meets-modern-science/

CPTVE

Phaser for Men

Perfumer: Delman St. Reene, 2022

and here is the formula:

When my eyes start to get heavy and I worry about forgetting what I read at night in bed, I usually grab a book that I’ve read many times before to completely shut down the night. Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’s guides usually fill that void. Their short pithy reviews contain no characters (unless you consider Turin a character) and there’s no plot to remember.

A few weeks ago, in a near dreaming state, I came across an interesting passage that surprisingly, I actually remembered when I awoke in the morning. In the introduction to their 2018 Guide, talking about the inanity of modern mainstream fragrances, Turin says,

“I remember one trying a trick on Google translate, to see what would happen if you took a literary text and translated it back and forth between English and French languages twenty or so times. Would it drift indefinitely far from the original? Would it settle to a steady state? Would it become weirder or plainer? The answer was, at least with the samples I tried, that it converged to a lifeless, stilted common-parlance reminiscent of EU committee reports.” (17)

My near dreamstate hairbrained thought was what if I play a trick on both Luca Turin and Google Translate and take one of Turin's reviews and do just as he suggests. I promise this is not a dog whistle to summon Turin from the depths of Substack. It’s merely a thought experiment for a Friday. For this trick to be slightly more effective, I thought I’d move the text through more than two languages. And better still, I would use a Turin 5 star review and a perfume that I personally love, Bogue's study in abstract lavender, Mem.

So without further delay, here is Turin’s original review of Mem in the 2018 Guide:

“Mem (Bogue) 5 Stars lavender jasmine

Mem is by far the most complex and ambitious fragrance Antonio Gardoni has composed, and smelling it on a strip is a bit like trying to read a closed book: the sheer density of the fragrance defeats understanding. On the skin, the breeze turns its pages one by one and it becomes readable. Mem is a three-movement thing played by a Parsifal-size 107-piece orchestra: a fresh, camphoraceous lavender-laurel up top that says “Fear not, good people: reassuring spicy-fresh masculine,” and would live a happy life all by itself; immediately behind, a huge, unexpected, regal jasmine-rose accord that breathes natural quality; and in the background, an animalic drydown in the grand, retro Bogue manner. In terms of balance, texture, and sheer symphonic opulence, Mem is in a very rarefied league. A tremendous achievement from any perfumer, all the more so from one who has a day job as an architect. LT” (185)

This is eloquent, right? Personally, I don’t know why so many people get bent out of shape about Turin. There seems to be a controversy every so often about a low score he’s given, either by perfumers, brands, or fans. I won't deny his influence, but have never felt the burning anger over anything he's written as some have.

A note on methods. First, there aren’t any really. Languages were chosen on a whim by me, a male human who speaks American English as a first language in a USA Midlands Dialect, who slips back into yinz every so often and tells his kids to "redd" up their rooms. Yes, I know what you're about to say, you haven't chosen many languages from South East Asia. I found that Google Translate errors out, and reaches a character limit, though I did include some non-Latin scripts. It’s also interesting to note that out of all the languages that I moved this review through, I *think* Latin mangled and angled the text the most. Here is my progression for those who care:

Hungarian---Maori---Romany---Basque---French---Scottish Gaelic---Bosnian---Icelandic---Kurdish---Somali---Khmer---Tamil---Bulgarian---Sanskrit---Latin---Sami (North)---Zapotec---English---Crimean Tartar---Malay---English

And here’s the resulting translation after 21 translations, which as you can see, is significantly different. It almost reads like a poem. Perhaps, it’s a testament to the perfume (which is fabulous), but Turin's words certainly helped.

“The perfume meme is associated with the character of Antonio Cardoni; It seems almost impossible to think of it now, like the documentary smell of a strange smell that has not yet arrived: like everything no longer makes sense. What really catches the eye, however, is the lighting, revealing the reality that is drowning around us. "Parsifal" works as a memetic form referring to a series of 107 notes: royal jasmine, like lavender flowing through a living waterfall, and the essence that complicates it is the goodness of nature "Only those who taste it know, man: guidance can come from anywhere"; The luxurious hero is getting further and further away from the skull waiting in that empty abyss. The weather encourages us to maintain a balanced classroom, both in terms of structure and the richness of the air. While it is wonderful to pause for a moment and soak in the aromatic eruption, we are increasingly losing interest in artistic expression.”

The resulting translation exudes so much existential dread and foreboding doom; it also has an air of predestination and it's almost as if the fates have condemned Gardoni. The only reassurance is that the hero is moving away from the skull (death) in the empty abyss. What could be worse than an "empty" abyss? Maybe Google Translate is subtly trying to turn the review into the actual medieval romance but pepper it with a classical doomed heroic epic imagery and funnel it through Dostoevsky's brain. Maybe perfume reviewing is its own unfulfilled grail quest. Maybe I should shut up and stop pretending I know what I'm talking about.

*All quotations are from Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez, Perfumes: The Guide. Tallinn: Perfüümista ÖÜ, 2018.

I was treated to warm hospitality, scenic views of Blake Island, as well Vetiver syrup sips and other odd and tasty nibbles from around the world. As an Australian, Donna also showed the group the proper way to eat Promite (Marmite competitor). The key is butter or a fatty layer! Noted.

It was a great opportunity to connect with new-to-me people and talk perfume / perfumery with some of the most creative scent minds in the area. Donna, perfumer, educator, and artist, has recently created The Scent Lending Library in New York City at the Olfactory Art Keller where members can check out scents, just like books. I didn't see anything about late fees. I hope she brings a version to the PNW. She also has an endlessly distracting personal perfume collection arranged by decade. Anjali (@Anjali_perfumes) has her own established perfume line and has also created scent art installations on Bainbridge Island and from the sounds of it, another one in the works. Jaimie (@jaimiequeue) is a fellow archivist as well as perfume lover who has studied under Mandy Aftel. Noele Lusano and Aubrey Gurtovenko (@scentappreciation) are both writers and creators. They co-edit the small press/project dedicated to scent called Ex Libris Odoratis. Noele has studied in Grasse and even created a few perfumes for sale along with printed matter at the press. In addition to being an author, Kashina (@illicium.verum.nova) has one of the most interesting Instagram pages around, filled with rare lps, cultural ephemera, cookbooks, and brilliant perfume reviews. If you need a refreshing escape from the sometimes boring world of perfume reviews, check hers out. 

Despite how welcoming and generally lovely everyone was, you can understand the reason why I was a bit intimidated and out of my depth for sure. These folks were just the sort of inspiration that I need and what makes Seattle one of the best perfume towns around. If you searched my notes app, you'd find an unfinished draft of a love letter to the Seattle perfume scene. Not only does Seattle have their share of connectors, they also have visionaries, AND probably most important, people willing to do the work to make things happen.

On to the workshop. As a non-sweet perfume loving person, I was having trouble coming up with my own theme. The overall workshop theme and materials were provided well beforehand, but it still took me a while to come up with a guiding principle to work toward. I felt like I needed some kind of central idea to hang this workshop on. If not, I would have just used up all the time simply smelling different materials. Drinking my coffee the morning of the workshop and staring out the half-lite door (that I need to replace next week), I peeped a Spotted Towhee flitting about in the crushed rock in my sideyard, and I got the ridiculous thought to make a dessert out of this bird. They are new visitors to my yarden and seem to have replaced the dumbo Oregon Juncos who usually visit. If you’ve never seen a Spotted Towhee, it’s a black-capped and backed bird with an orange belly, and piercing deep orange eyes which seem to be made of redhot candy. It’s like a smaller and chonkier robin, but more frenetic in movement, and less of a bird-beagle call. Looking back, this is a pretty dumb idea, but I went with it, like a captain going down with the ship.

After sniffing around materials (some new, some not so new to me), I chose 13: Ambergris Artessence base (Biolandes), Vanilla Crystals, Mushroom accord (Donna's own), Milk Lactone, Sulfurol, Rose EO from Morocco, Phenylacetic Acid, Sakura Salicylate, Safranal, Orange Power (Givaudan), Black Pepper, Yellow Mandarine. Most of these were diluted to 10% or 1%. Some like Black Pepper and Safranal were diluted to both.

We were given 5 trials or mods to dial in our initial composition. As levels are extremely important, I used all 5 and was rushing to get finished. I learned that I'm much more plodding/slow pokey than I thought. I guess I just need time to make, analyze, rest, and reformulate. I also discovered how important it is for me smell sketches/modifications in spray form to get the full picture. It was hard to smell side by sides at one time on strips; there was a lot of olfactory noise with scent strips and previous modifications.

At first, I used a Madeleine Key Accord base that overpowered everything and was way too cloyingly sweet that my glucose spiked just by smelling it. I completely scrapped it and let the vanilla take on that role, despite wanting an over-the-top sugar bird. I just couldn’t bring myself to keep it. If I lost my gourmand theme, I might as well make something balanced and somewhat finished. I also need to work on my drop economy as I went over the 190 drop limit for a final 5 ml finished sprayable final.

So how did my edible bird smell in its final version? As you can probably guess, it came out like a milky orange creamsicle, but with a sheer almost transparent ambroxan layer. This base stretched the perfume out to a fakey plastic feel. I’m a little sad that the stankier elements of the ambergris base didn’t come through more prominently. It went more salty ambroxan than the fecal bits of say Ambergris Ollifac base, which I have in my home materials. The pepper and safranol didn’t really show up despite using them in higher proportions. Instead, the pepper seemed to add to the sheerness of the perfume rather than piercing it as I had hoped. As Rose is wont to do, this full purple-inflected Moroccan rose blended with the Sakura salicylate and gave my final a freshness.

Ultimately, I'm not really sure whether I like my final version or not, but it was a great exercise either way. I have to give it some time to rest (or maybe my nose) and then test again. It’s just not that interesting if I’m being completely honest. Kashina's and Jaimie's creations, however, (Rotting Fruit Supermarket and Green Cake respectively) were incredibly evocative. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to smell everyone's creations as I was so far behind in my own.

If I tried this theme with my own materials, I would probably go straight for the synthetic civet for the dark aspects of the bird. I would also probably take it in less of a modern, ambroxan-heavy direction and go classical (civet, vanilla, etc.) and thicker, perhaps keeping the ambergris feeling, but in significantly lower proportions. I might actually make a non-sweet wearable version of this to see if I can capture the bird aspect a bit better and leave the sweet theme in the candy jar.

Thank you to Donna and her partner, Dustin, for opening their home, Jaimie for linking me up with this group, Noele for organizing, and the rest for sharing their time and perfume table with me.

I've tried to shy away from reviewing hype monsters (no pun intended). That's why it's taken me so long to get a hold of and review Nosferatu by Heretic. It also plays into my out of touch personal brand.

Heretic's perfume collaboration with David Eggers's 2024 rehash of the 1922 German expressionist film of the same name certainly made a splash on social media. I don't think I've ever seen as much excitement around a perfume launch, though this is probably only in my little corner of social media. People posted enthusiastically that they were planning on wearing it to the theatre. Bring back Smell-O-Vision! Even my film obsessed Dave Eggers superfan and decidedly non-perfume friend knew about the perfume collab. While I liked the film, it didn't speak to me as much as some of his other work, namely the Northman. I'll spare you the reasons here, but despite my preferences, Nosferatu had an unmistakably artistic and devastating beauty and I completely understand the intense love for this film and perfume that some of you have.

I would like to thank Sam Flores who was kind enough to send me a sample of this with very little prompting. Check out Sam's substack if you haven't already. She's an extremely amatuer perfumer like me.

I counted 48 mentions of "vampire" on the fragrantica review page for this fragrance, so it's clear that the concept and collab resonated with its audience. It's interesting to note that I also found two other perfumes named Nosferatu (Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab circa 2014 and Xyrena in 2024). Without diving into specific materials, I can definitely see Heretic's compositional link to Orlok's cold castle and many of the sparse, blue-tinged nighttime scenes of the movie. I really enjoyed reading thoughtful and imaginative reviews of this perfume, but ultimately, I couldn't entirely connect the perfume concept/execution to movie and the perfume/movie to my mind.

What I found more interesting about Nosferatu, however, is the risk taken by perfumer Douglas Little in not doing a more obvious "darker" composition that would have been a safer bet with both fragrance fans as well as wider audiences. Frankly, the cold pale floral approach really surprised me. It certainly evokes the more solitary moments of the story and the almost ever present moonlight.

This release brings together a few separate threads about goth audiences, perfume nuance, perfume / media collaborations, and overall hype and marketing. I mentioned last post (Iris Silver Mist) about what I see as an influx of self-identified goths into perfume fandom, conceding that this might be just new to me. I think it's important to note that in my mind one of the most "gothic" perfume brands, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, first launched somewhere around 2000. Maybe it's a modern focus on aesthetics rather than a clearly defined subculture, where goth can just be an outfit or mood board along with others such as dark academia, coastal grandma, etc. I know, I know. This clearly shows my age. Again, this might be me, but it seems like there is a turn toward macabre elements in perfume in general. Not that this speaks for all perfumery, but a search for "goth perfume" on Etsy brings back scores and scores of black labeled perfume oils and sprays all with a gothic theme. I wonder if brands are responding to audiences or audiences are responding to brands? Am I just imagining this? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Keep in mind that I'm not disparaging goths or dark themed perfumes. I'm simply noticing. If anything, it's making fragrance more available and interesting and less focused on the old chestnut of luxury and wealth.

Another thread that Nosferatu brings out is that while fragrance enthusiasts are still likely to latch onto names and concepts (i.e. "if it's named Coven, then it must be witchy" type of thinking), they are expecting (or maybe are more open to) nuanced perfumes and interpretations of a theme. In the case of Nosferatu, accepting a cold pale floral instead of a sticky haunted darker perfume. Heretic's Nosferatu also marks a really successful film and perfume collaboration. We're all accustomed to movie-inspired perfumes (Moth and Rabbitt; Strangers/Prin to name just a few brands), but I suspect that we'll be seeing more of these formal colabs in niche/indie/artisan perfumery. Do you know of any past movie-perfume collaborations?

Ok. What does Nosferatu smell like? I'll spare you official notes lists and pyramid screenshots. You can all open up Basenotes or Parfumo at this point; you’ve probably all smelled it by now.

I get a minty almost aquatic top to the lilac accord, but this could be the aroma chemical floralozone though I'm usually incorrect in these things. This new green growth in Nosferatu feels disconnected to the larger theme. The overall lilac accord skews dusty and is less like the “photorealistic” blooms and more like catching lilacs at the moment when they start to wither and die. It's almost completely devoid of the astringent muguet materials that one might expect, but if present, would have given this perfume an unneeded life. The violet adds just the right amount of chalkiness to the lilac, and the combination of the two floral elements creates a diffusive dill quality, though this is probably just my nose. It's not anywhere near lethal Santal 33 levels, but is oddly present. It might be an anise note/material as I sometimes get these two mixed up. Either way, it takes my attention from the main theme.

The sheer aroma chemicals are doing the real heavy lifting in Nosferatu, providing endless and listless space in the fragrance, but at the cost of oversaturation, in my opinion. I sense a hint of the fecal matter note present in the Ambergris Oliffac base, which might have been used here. I enjoy this aspect as it helps to break up the heavily ambrox/Iso E Super mid and turns it more in a salinic and true ambergris direction, if only briefly. I also detect a superamber deep in the base giving it strength, but not weight. It still feels vaporous, but not nearly as ghastly as say Iris Silver Mist. There's also a good deal of clean laundry musk deep in the base that helps to bridge and connect the powdery elements of lilac/violet and gives a sly wink to vintage compositions. Despite these little retro touches and the time and setting of the film, Nosferatu is a thoroughly modern perfume, stripped down and sleek. While most contemporary fragrances have their share of ambroxan, Iso-E Super, and musks, Nosferatu's minimal design makes these elements stand out that much more. You can almost feel the transparent role that they play in the perfume. Despite how this reads, I'm not one of those "not in my perfume" types of people all the while, undergirding all of the perfumes on my shelf. I use ambroxan and Iso E Super all the time in my own compositions. They serve a purpose and do so here. 

Nosferatu (especially in its top notes) has an optimism that I wouldn’t have expected. It’s not quite sunny bergamot optimism, but it doesn’t seem as cursed as I thought it should. The earthy elements work exceptionally well. I just wish they were slightly more present. Without the story, concept, and packaging leading me there, I might struggle to clearly put this in the Gothic category or associate it with the movie or overall theme. Without the theme for help, though, I'm not sure how many people would connect with it. If it were called Dirty Violet or Dirty Lilac (as Heretic likes to do), would it be as popular? Not sure. Will it be a classic that can stand alone without the film? Probably not. Does it nail the brief or theme? Most will agree that it does an excellent job at this task, despite whatever I say. Does it mark some kind of watershed moment in perfumery? I predict hesitantly, yes. What do you say?

It wouldn't surprise many, that my favorite iris (so far) has to be Iris Silver Mist (ISM) by Serge Lutens. Yes, it's a classic. Yes, it's a popular choice so I have to fight the urge to shy away from writing about classics and embrace. 

I think the first thing that makes this perfume special, however, is that it wasn't created by Christopher Sheldrake, who was and still is Serge Lutens's in-house perfumer. Instead, it was created by Maurice Roucel in 1994. Roucel is nothing but prolific. His long CV boasts: Hermes 24 Fauborg, Frederic Malle Musc Ravaguer, Gucci Envy, Kenzo Air, and Le Labo Labdanum 18. I'm not entirely sure how or why Roucel was given this project, but I'm glad that he was. While an early perfume from the brand, Iris Silver Mist was not Lutens's first release. He had Santal de Mysore, Ambre Sultan, and a few others under his belt by this time. 

What does Iris Silver Mist smell like? 

Well, as someone relatively new to iris perfumes, the first thing that jumps out to me in Iris Silver Mist is the carrot seed. I'm not sure who exactly first paired iris with carrot seed, but this has to be one of the earliest and probably the earliest to pair it with iris. Cruising Fragrantica's notes search (sorry) under carrot seed, I can tell that this creation seems to have had a big influence on the newer 2010s and 2020s iris creations. So much so that many of the irises that I reviewed this week contained this clever pairing to varying degrees. I'll add to that list Iris Cendre from Naomi Goodsir that I recently resmelled. 

It's cold and this late night frigid aspect is so evocative and to borrow from probably 1000 reviews, it's a "funeral iris.” Roucel is rumoured to have chucked in every orris material he had. Another legend is that it has an unusually large amount of real orris in it, maybe to justify the current $320 USD price tag. I do sense a lot of orris here, but I can't exactly distinguish all of the different aroma chemical characteristics. In addition to iris, ISM also relies on a sharp woody backbone, primarily cedar. This woody retainer keeps what little powdery orris space dust there is in firm check. 

Some have complained that Iris Silver Mist really isn’t a completed perfume. To them, I would say that they are partially right. What I think they are getting at is that it is lithe and spare without the rose and jasmine that so many vintage powdery iris perfumes employ, from No. 5 to Shalimar, just to name a few. Perhaps in 1994, it might come off emotionally dead and too cold, but it fits exceptionally well into 2025’s field of perfumes that embraces everything from vintage beauty to any type of mood or scene that you could think of.

ISM as a Gothic Fragrance

I've noticed an increase in goth or goth-adjacent folks getting into fragrance or perhaps them simply coming into my little corner of social media. In the past year, I've also seen a lot of people talking about their favorite perfumes or brands releasing perfumes that play up their darker sides. Perhaps the best example is the macabre turn that Heretic has taken after the release of their hit, Nosferatu. I'm not (or was never) a goth or even goth-adjacent so I can't really speak to anything other than an anecdotal observation. Too young for the new romantics/post-punk folks and a bit too old for the hot topic Nightmare before Christmas crowd, I never quite clicked with Sheena and her goth gang. I knew more about Ostrogoth Theodoric and the heroic age than I did about Bauhaus and anything about Bela Lugosi, but I really like the idea of a scent that speaks to the gothic tales of early the romantic period. Just like our varying ideas of what makes a “green” perfume, I think we all carry a different idea of what makes gothic scent (see also “witchy”).  

While it doesn't dress like a goth in its copy or packaging, Iris Silver Mist to me, is the epitome of a gothic perfume. It's more at home in the cemetery than in the makeup kit. It's decidedly unfriendly, like the Seattle Freeze, but without the small talk and empty promises. It feels like you're in a tomb or crypt. I've never been buried alive before, but if so, I would expect that it would smell pretty much like this. It’s rooty, cold, and almost clammy, but it’s not claustrophobic. [Sidenote: my friend has in fact been buried alive at a film festival in Austin, TX by Austrians so I'll have to ask him.] If not an actual coffin, then the mist in the title is definitely one that fell on a cemetery.

What are your favorite iris fragrances? What about gothic perfumes? Do you think Iris Silver Mist is a gothic perfume?