nose and nous

…don’t know about you, but I am un CHIEN! Andalusien! --Black Francis

I picked up a number of samples by the indie perfumer D.S. & Durga, including “Steamed Rainbow,” “Deep Dark Vanilla,” “Pistachio,” and this one. Debaser is my favorite so far.

Online reviews are mixed. The famous and eloquent Kafkaesque likes this, but argues an incongruity in its name; while Debaser cites the 1989 Pixies tune, the Black Francis screech is nowhere to be found in this pleasant, fig-based fragrance, powdered with a little iris, warmed up with tonka and coconut, sweetened with pear, and something slightly spicy and woody underneath. Other reviewers have taken up this theme, confused by the edgy name, complaining, even, about false advertising. Many allusions to green accords, garden wanders, fresh meadows, and so forth; all the traditional imagery of the mainstream mind as it seeks an exit from the ordinary.

I smell these described notes, certainly—the milky fig, the coconut, not too sweet but very present; the bassy tonka, the blonde wood, the iris and the moss all cutting through the lactones and preventing them from getting insipid.

But I am not transported to a bosky grove or dew-laden meadow: this fragrance is no portal to Narnia.

It's a little like one of those reversible pictures--a goose one way, an old lady another; if you focus too much on the fig and all its lacy green assumptions, you miss the city.

Because the thing is I get a very specific hit of leather jacket—no, vinyl… no, leather after all, a biker jacket, nice and bulky, the kind you wear as armor for the subway. The jacket you wear as you stand in the corner of the mechanics’ garage when your moto goes tits-up. The one you have on as you chew on a pear-flavored hard candy, lounging, inconspicuous, waiting for that guy on your docket--the dumb one, the weak link--to come out of the liquor store and lead you to your real quarry.

The one you wear when even the rain feels dirty.

The longer I had Debaser on, the more the affect crystallized: it’s Midgar, buddy. If this name means nothing to you, don’t worry. Just drop in the degraded urban environment of your choice, but fill it with the joy and optimism peculiar to that space, the joy of catching the last train, the joy of spicy red oil noodles, the joy of sarcastic jokes with your partner in crime.

For friends of mine who know where Midgar is—thus what I mean by citing it—I should warn you that depending on your skin chemistry, you may have to traverse an astonishing amount of coconut before the leather jacket, the train, the slanting light all come out to play. You may also find the pear alienating. Me, I like it; it’s artificial, but it’s not pretending. You keep the little tin of those little pear-flavored jewels in the pocket of that leather jacket and you watch the sun track across the hoardings as you listen to the buskers, taking your time.

People don’t like this.

Reviews complain that it’s too old and fusty, or too modern and artificial; that its tenure is too brief and also that it goes on forever. I can imagine this scent getting accidentally associated with a painful event and becoming intolerable, intolerable; it is a very sponge for memory. 

It’s not friendly, not easily construed. It doesn’t enable you to smell like pastry,  green tea, or an ocean wave. It is not wholesome, like a flower field or a string of laundry drying in the sun. At certain angles, however, you might detect… a room? A room, a chair, a window that looks out onto night: a darkness pierced in places by faint sodium lights, far from us, and wreathed in violet cloud; a darkness that threatens rain.

There is more than a touch of smoke in this old-school chypre. Sweet at turns, with a hint of fruitiness that comes not just from the bergamot but also from the rose: almost a nectarine, though there’s no sign of one on the notes list. This sweetness comes and goes, trading places with art supplies, modeling clay, and a faintly resinous quality supplied by benzoin and possibly, possibly, the raspberry leaf. The smell of paper: readers, you know what I mean. It combines with a cold, rainy magnolia in a way that's very hard to parse, hard to pin down. An intoxicating boozy vanilla appears from time to time but never takes this fragrance into modern gourmand territory. Not at all. Not ever. This acerbic vanilla is the closest that Kintsugi gets to the gold implied in its name: a gold for seaming, a potter's gold.

This fragrance does not soar, although my heart leapt when I first smelled it. It does not resolve its harmonies. It's not involved with heaven; its sky is a lowering one, the sky of a room whose window looks inward. 

This thing is for thinking. It’s not telling you anything you already know.

It’s my birthday, and I think I’m getting myself a bottle of this.

Yes, for sure, this is sweet. 

If you are unaccustomed to these potent vanillas à la Tihota, Fire At Will will almost certainly overwhelm you. You won’t be able to detect anything but the ambery, sugary vanilla, landing like a blow on the temple. 

That said, this somehow is not quite a gourmand; there is something else here, something floral, with a faint green edge that lends Fire At Will a slightly wrathful quality--a grimace rather than a smile. This greenish note is having a sword fight with the carmelizing vanilla and keeps it from going full bakery. The slight flavor of disappointment conveyed by that little green edge: mimosa, maybe—or a tiny trace of the vetiver that is supposed to be providing a bit of spine in the base? Neither nose nor nous can tell. What the vetiver does do is add a little sparkle, a little carbonation; it sours and darkens the burnt caramel, pushing it away from pastry kitchens and towards grass fires—a very slight hint of acridity, black smoke smudged on the horizon. 

The longer I wear this, the more confused I am by the general reception to this fragrance. I don’t get the same vibe at all from this that many reviewers do; no cupcakes. There is plenty of amber, and a detectable brown sugar note, for sure. The musk that warms Tihota is also present here, but the mimosa makes it less friendly, and the vetiver (this is why I like this one; can you tell?) collects the boozy facets of the vanilla and de-saturates them, sharpens them: Dorothy Parker lofting awful observations as the evening turns, increasingly unkind remarks spiraling up and out of the gin-and-tonic so that you find yourself obliged to lay your hand on her arm and gently suggest it’s time to pack it in. 

Word on the street is that Open Sky is Byredo’s salute to what it hopes is the incipient end of the pandemic: a perfume that smells like travel, freedom, escape from lockdown. 

It’s certainly friendly and fresh, and very easy to wear. The pomelo lends a touch of paint thinner, which sounds awful but is actually delightful from a personal angle: astringent and redolent of my early life. I prefer fragrances that smell like art supplies, apparently. I can imagine someone else, without an art background, smelling a tiny hint of naptha-kerosene and getting an airport sky lounge flooded with that stunning early 1970s kind of light, the kind that blows out the noses on your vacation pictures. 

It’s good for summer wear because the citrus is on the cool side. There’s a tiny bit of swimming pool accord here, too. But it’s not icy; I think the hemp and vetiver both keep it in the human realm. 

I’ve been messing around with perfumes for about two years now. I’ve come to learn a little about what I love most, and that’s movement: I like a perfume that evolves on the skin as elements burn off or wear away. In my still-limited experience, Amouage builds perfumes that you fall into, like the layered strata of Schliemann’s Troy. Their Epic Woman is my first rose-oud—a classic combination in the perfumery of the Middle East—and it is mind-altering. 

I think my favorite notes here are the woods that open up the composition: sandalwood, guiac, oud. Bone-dry, astringent, refreshing, peppery: summer art classes when I was thirteen, drinking coffee out of the coin-op machine and drawing endlessly, technique aiding imagination, not fighting with it. Certain reviewers think something in this note smells like pickles. Not me! I smell art praxis: pencil shavings with a hint of solvents. 

There’s geranium abetting the wood, building a bridge of sorts to a damask rose that reminds me of Grandma Ethyl’s house in Kenilworth, the jellied air, the garden and its dream extension into an ancient city just beyond the hedge, just beyond the sundial, twilight facsimile of a world I sensed ‘out there’ as a very small child. The rose also adds a sharp sweetness. Without the spicy woods and a layer of patchouli, Epic Woman would be too much for this nose. Instead, it’s enveloping, intoxicating, and it gets better and better as it dries down, with an illusion of chocolate forming somewhere in the interplay of the tea, amber, musk, and vanilla. 

Because it’s Amouage, an Oman-based house legendary for its expensive ingredients and expansive sillage, this thing is gigantic. I have on a few drops and they will last for hours more. 

It seems a little creepy, going by label, going by ‘reputation,’ going by ‘vibe,’ to put on Opium in the face of a wildfire and wear it while looking out a window on a landscape blanketed by smoke.

But this morning Opium is incense and tuberose. It’s not pretending everything is okay. It’s not fresh in the face of the smoke, not nostalgic, not wishful.

One packs the emergency bag. One waits. 

The time of coronavirus is an anxiety-laden time. Smells can be powerful aids to easing anxiety. This one works for me.

Bruno Fazzolari is, so far, one of my favorite indie perfumers. I personally find his work a little more linear and a little less refined than, say, that of Patricia Nicolaï (my other gigantic favorite). But his compositions are clear, unusual, and beguiling. I’ve tried about half a dozen of his fragrances (including the stellar and much-lauded Lampblack); Ummagumma is my favorite.

It lives in the “gourmand” category of foodie fragrances, but it is more atmosphere than dessert, with a lot of touches traditionally considered ‘masculine.’ There are marked notes of dark chocolate, tobacco, and coffee, but also sandalwood and saffron, a shimmer of frankincense, a tiny hint of leather, of amber, coming from a wonderful labdanum note. There’s spicy carnation, too, maybe my favorite floral note of all time. Underneath, there’s cedar and vanilla and tonka bean—real tonka, my Steady Eddie, my favorite fragrance companion when things get rough. 

The whole composition is warm, restful, slightly boozy. I find the mix calming on a visceral level, a spectacular olfactory antidote to coronavirus anxiety. You can get a sample for about 5 bucks from LuckyScent. Really. If you like warm,  ambery stuff, try this one. This is how it feels to me--I know it sounds a little weird, but bear with me:

You are an indoor cat that has through some unfortunate accident become an outdoor cat. After surviving perilously for quite some time in an uncaring city, you find yourself collected and deposited in the private, booklined study of some gigantically powerful Someone who has arranged for you to have a bath (horrible) and a snack of sardines (delightful) and now you are sitting on an alpaca knit throw on an ottoman in front of a fire. You can still remember the stress of surviving, the ghost of it still lingers in your fur, but it is fading now. 

This pleases me.

Luca Turin loathed this perfumer, but this fragrance was not composed by her, but rather by Frederick Dalman, the “in house nose” of the company that continues in her wake (the eponymous founder of the company passed away in 2011). I say this because I like this perfume, at least at the front end.

Restrained, bone-dry, almost a sawdust quality in the opening – a starkness I love. Black pepper, because what perfume am I going to sample and review that doesn’t contain black pepper? Come on Hints of apricot, a fruit to which I am not too opposed when it appears in perfume. The list tells me there are currant leaves – I’ve never smelled them before, but they may be providing a greenish note here. Slightly churchy oppoponax meets slightly astringent oleander, with coffee notes lying underneath, but the key is a special, renewable Australian sandalwood.

I can imagine people smelling this and being turned off by a funny, greenish edge in the sandalwood, like being unexpectedly the butt of someone else’s sarcastic remark. I sort of like being treated like this for some reason, so I enjoy this acerbity. My sample is small, so it’s difficult for me to gauge sillage or even longevity.

This fragrance is sympathetic to the twin energies of morning coffee and complete exhaustion. It’s also, though it’s been a long time since this is been relevant to me personally, perfect ‘aftermath’ wear, ideal for reconstituting yourself after whatever the hell went down the night before.

Supposedly inspired by the ancient city of Petra, indeed the woods in this tell of sandstone, chalk dust, dry air.

My only complaint about Santal Nabataea is the back end: I’m not sure what is in the base, exactly, but I suspect there is something synthetic propping up the sandalwood. Over time, this synthetic spine asserts itself. It’s inoffensive, but it lacks the nuance of the opening.

One thing I’m getting used to in fragrance-land is that lists of notes are not lists of ingredients. Some accords don’t actually contain any trace of the ‘real’ thing they present (lily of the valley is a notorious example; you can’t get viable essential oil out of this flower, so any ‘muguet’ accord you smell is a perfumer’s contraption). I’m not astute or experienced enough to identify the aromachemical that pins and stabilizes the back end of Santal Nabataea, but I wish it were as inventive and interesting as the front end, which I find delightful.

Santal Nabataea may warrant a larger sample; if a stronger application yields a difference in the drydown, I will issue an updated review.

Patricia de Nicolaï’s work generally gets excellent reviews from Luca Turin. I’m prepared to undergo mysterious perfume experiences in order to try and understand what he gets out of a fragrance, and although this one confused me initially, I’m glad I stuck around.

We start off with intense sweetness, but not a note I associate with either tonka, with its humid, somehow deeply comforting earthy aura, or vanilla, with its smooth, elevated creaminess, like flying on top of cloud cover. Instead, I get a hit of sugary lime combined with high-end dressing room. There’s a little hint of freshness, like marine air, a touch of suntan lotion—are we in Orange County? 

A silk scarf, a Key Lime truffle: underneath, a touch of something smoky, slightly edgy. I kind of like this note. Something malleable, like plasticine clay, arises in the wake of the lime. There is structure here that takes Vanille Tonka out of the realm of just pretty; there is an energy released that is both capable and creative. There’s also something slightly melancholy here that cuts into the sweetness. This may be the carnation that’s listed as a heartnote; see below.

There are layers here. Vanille Tonka doesn’t have the appealing rough edge I’ve come to enjoy in artisan creations like Bruno Fazzolari’s, but as it settles on the skin, it gets spicier. I get a really enjoyable black pepper note, and I finally begin to detect tendrils of the promised tonka. I start to get a sense that the chair has enough legs and is planted on the ground. In fact, it gets more interesting as it dries down. 

Tonka—a note I first fell for in Van Cleef and Arpels Bois Doré—has this curiously attentive, patient quality on the skin. I find it profoundly easing to be around; it has this air, I know this sounds crazy, of a doctor who looks at you through a pair of black-rimmed glasses and carefully, silently, respectfully, and with great gravity listens to you explain your experience. You are perfectly clear that you are in good hands; you can sleep now.

Listed notes go like this: basil, lemon, and mandarin on top (no lime!); carnation, orange flower absolute, black pepper, cinnamon in the heart; and frankincense, vanilla absolute, and tonka bean in the base.

Speaking to these notes, I’ll say this: the cinnamon is just right, not overwhelming; the pepper is a terrific addition; and the frankincense is…strangely moving, and deeply humanizing. 

This is my first Tauer fragrance.  

Andy Tauer, the eponymous creator of the Tauer perfumes, is self-taught, a pioneer in the relatively new category of artisan perfumers (Bruno Fazzolari is another one of these brilliant outsiders, who will get several blog entries of his own soon). 

To call it friendly and wearable is not wrong, but kind of a disservice to this wonderfully meditative offering. It’s a remarkable combination of warm and cool, reassuring and invigorating, and absolutely my jam.

I understand from reading Luca Turin and other reviewers that Tauer is famous for creating ‘environmental’ perfumes, fragrances that conduct you to a startlingly specific place. 

I’ve never been to the Swiss Alps, so I can’t say whether this fragrance has captured that air. For me, the environment evoked, with almost shocking precision, is both urban and personal: L’air des Alpes Suisses reminds me of Berkeley in the early 1990s. For a handful of months I lived just off Telegraph Avenue in an immaculate communal house on Dana Street, owned by a pair of extraordinary young people who had, through tragedy (a car accident had left one of them paraplegic), come into enough money to make a few of their dreams come true. They rented rooms to artists and writers for next to nothing, asking only that they be considerate housemates. It was a creative, bohemian space, but quiet, curiously orderly, almost protective.

There is a slight ‘clean soap’ component that some reviewers have attributed to white flowers of some kind; I think the lemon balm definitely plays a part in this. There is also a slightly astringent, kind of tangy element that might be brought in by the kitchen herbs and the nutmeg. I definitely smell hints of lily and orchid here, but to my nose these florals are not too overwhelming, too sweet, or too domesticated. The ingredients include the incredibly evocative ‘dried needles;’ it took me awhile to detect this, wrapped in the cool fir and birch.  I think there’s a slightly ‘mystical’ undertone here, maybe the rosewood, ambergris, tonka in combination: Tarot cards laid out on the dining room table after the crumbs have been brushed away.  

L’air des Alpes Suisses is a clean, well-lit room, minimally furnished with beautiful, slightly shabby antiques. A place where you might curl up to knit chainmail, or work on a painting, but where it feels natural to take care not to fuck up the gorgeous hardwood floor. 

This one starts out polite. The blending is what I’ve come to expect from Chanel—a seamless grouping of accords, nothing jarring, nothing raising its voice. The first impression is earthy, spicy, yet very clean. There are undertones of incense, but no trace of a church. If you feel any reverence, smelling this, it’s all on you.

Basenotes and Fragrantica point to vetiver, juniper, cypress as main players here. If you’re a drinker, the coolness and the faintly shining edge of a gin martini might come to mind. I’m not a drinker—not anymore—so what comes to mind for me is a quiet, yet intensely daunting debrief with a terrifyingly intelligent supervisor. 

The light in his office is subdued; the surface of his desk is immaculate. The wood’s polished, but not mirror-shiny. The flat plane of this desk is where campaigns are waged, strategies worked out. This delineated space for strategies is ever-present when you think of him; you can sense it whenever he speaks. It’s what allows him to be utterly unsurprised.

There is reserve here, like patches of shadow in shadow, darker dark against dark. There is something afoot in his silence. He’s not going to rat you out to your mutual employer. It’s not a topic of conversation. But the deployments have already taken place. 

At the end of the day, long after the sun’s gone down, he will leave work in a long coat and a cashmere scarf just a click off from pure white. You have no idea where he lives. You’ve been debriefed. You have new instructions. He scares the shit out of you, but you’re pretty sure you can trust him. 

This came with two other fruity-smelling samples. When I first tried it - a hesitant spritz on a wrist at the end of a trying day, no idea what I was in for - I found it overwhelming, bewildering, an instant scrubber. 

Trying it again, over a week later and in a very different state of mind, I find it compelling as hell. 

There is a giant clove presence at the front end of this, followed up immediately with the sting of wormwood, cardamom, mandarin orange, and spiraling incense. Some reviewers have reported something like grape Kool-aid in this combo. I don’t find it that fakey-sweet, although I kind of see how you might get there, depending on your nose, by the way the mandarin and the wormwood (the main ingredient of absinthe) combine with the clove.

Take note: it is huge. If you get curious and order a sample, apply sparingly at first and buckle up. 

It’s spicy, dark and incense-heavy; the absinthe note is Quite Real, as is the smokiness of the incense. If you’re into clean, airy, sunshiney scents, fresh, outdoorsy smells, or delicate, realistic floral notes, you almost certainly will recoil from this. If you decide to roll with it, though, you’re in for an adventure. Fragrances of the World (link) classifies this beast as a “dry woody” fragrance; it took me a while to understand why. If you’re sensitive to the clove note—or to the heady florals that come in right underneath the clove, a mixture of slightly indolic* white flowers, jasmine, roses—it’s going to make it harder to notice the dryer, more austere dimensions of this fragrance—the wonderful pepper, cut wood, labdanum, and oakmoss. There is also a touch of fantastically well-kept leather shoe or handbag here that becomes more pronounced over time. I’ve even seen reviewers describe this as a chypre,** which, holy shit, entirely changes one’s perception of the scent. 

I want this perfume to correct my Sanskrit pronunciation. I want it to side-eye me. I want to be wrong in its presence, just for the pleasure of getting the history lesson or the grammar lesson or the demonstration of four-cornered logic. Its vowels are beautifully restrained, its consonants are extraordinary. It’s not very impressed by this extended metaphor, and questions the utility of the personification of a fragrance. I’m at its mercy.

*the almost-too-much, intimate hit you get from strong jasmine or honeysuckle.

This engrossing review of Turin and Sanchez’ perfume criticism has some valuable things to say about criticism in general, especially in the context of the anonymous yet overly intimate world of social media. 

“The rise in social media has also had a curiously ‘flattening’ effect on perfume criticism over the past 10 years. Fans, buyers, small brands, marketing professionals, schills, bloggers, and vloggers are increasingly thrown together into the same tight social spaces on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. And with all these brand owners and reviewers following each other and marked as ‘friends’ in each other’s contact lists, the desire to be frank melts away in the face of the desire to be nice.

“Like Kevin Bacon, it’s all about the six degrees of separation. Every reviewer feels safe criticizing the belly fluff that is Mon Guerlain because nobody has to face Thierry Wasser personally. But what if you want to write a review for a perfume made by someone in the Facebook group you visit every morning? What about a negative review for an independent perfume maker you see around on Reddit, for whom a review can make or break their business? You’d have to be inhuman not to admit that that’s a different ballgame. This kind of social intimacy between brands, bloggers, and end users can be enormously useful for information flow, but in terms of maintaining critical autonomy, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

The author also writes excellent perfume reviews as ClaireV on Basenotes.