Kerosene Part 2: Blackmail and R’Oud Elements

Mining the same marshmallow-meets-campfire vein as By the Fireplace by Maison Martin Margiela, albeit only about a hundred times more pleasant and natural-smelling, Blackmail captures that exciting feeling of anticipation your tummy gets at a country fair, the promise of something deep-fried and sugary vibrating on the air like a wind chime.

The luscious berry-tipped incense topnote is a cruel tease – smell it once and then it’s gone, but not before introducing the central block of fruit-over-smoked-oakwood that hangs around for the rest of the ride.

Though distinguished by a wonderfully sour streak of sodden, fermenting oud chips, Blackmail eventually settles into a shape not a million miles away from Broken Theories. They don’t smell alike note for note, but make no mistake – these guys happily fill the same gap in a well-curated wardrobe.

My own personal preferences lean more towards sandalwoody woodsmoke than burnt marshmallow, so I’m currently only tempted by Broken Theories. But, honestly, either would do in a pinch for when I am craving something sweet n’ smoky in that slightly blocky style of Kerosene. And that, really, is my one bone to pick with Blackmail and all fragrances like it. They are always more set pieces – big wooden panels you move around in each scene to achieve a specific effect – than the kind of thing that sets the imagination alight. Mind you, that’s not to say,  as we limp across the finish line of 2020, that there isn’t value to walking around with your own personal country-fair-meets-campfire soundtrack playing on a constant loop over your head.

R’Oud Elements is a total wow for me – just wow! Pairing a bitter orange note (itself lurching charmingly from the naturalness of a freshly-peeled orange to the artificiality of a vitamin C drink) with a savory sandalwood standing in for oud, it has much the same effect as Many Aftel’s Oud Luban, in that it throws open the windows and floods a dark material (oud) with citrusy light.

R’Oud Elements turns the traditional treatment of oud – almost reverential, lengthening the shadows of its dankness with similarly deep, brown flavors, or countering them with truffled rose notes – on its head, making it sing out in hot orange-gold tones. R’Oud Elements is so bright it’s blinding – fizzy, zesty, and slightly mineralic. It smells like someone spilled freshly-squeezed orange juice on a grungy old brown leather sofa, which is all the better for it. The scent stops just short of achieving maximum creamsicle, the bitter orange never quite bridging it all the way to the creaminess set free by the sandal in the base. But feel good? God, yes.

Many people on Fragrantica say that this smells like M7 (Yves Saint Laurent), one of the first commercial fragrances in the West to feature oud. And I suppose that’s fair, though it is the sour, nutty mealiness of cedarwood (or even vetiver), rather than amber, painting an exotic picture of oudiness here. But what this reminds of the most – in effect, if not smell – is that low-high contrast between the aromatic, fizzy ‘dustiness’ of Italian herbs and the satiny, sour-cream umami-ness of sandalwood that runs through much of Lorenzo Villoresi’s work, particularly that of Sandalo and Musk. Something about the rub of something sharp or aromatic (saffron, lavender, orange peel) against something tartly lactonic (musk, sandalwood), fleshed out by an intensely powdery cedar, creates in all three scents the impression of cream lightly curdled by a squirt of lemon juice.

If I didn’t already own Musk (Lorenzo Villoresi) and vintage Sandalo (Etro) to satisfy my aromatic tart-sour-creamy woody needs, I would be setting my cap hard at R’Oud Elements. As it is, I’m still thinking about R’Oud Elements long after my sample is gone.  

Source of Sample: I purchased my Kerosene samples from the wonderful Polish website Lulua. I have used Lulua many times over the past five years to sample American or Canadian indies, such as Slumberhouse, Zoologist, Olympic Orchids, and now, Kerosene, which can be extremely difficult for European customers to track down and smell. I am 100% happy to recommend Lulua, because they provide a terrific service for not too much money, have the best packaging I’ve ever seen for samples-only orders, and they always throw in a few extras too.

Cover Image: Photo by Simon Zhu on Unsplash