Narcotico
Narcotico follows a pattern I’ve begun to notice in the work of Giuseppe Imprezzabile, the perfumer behind Meo Fusciuni, in that the perfumes are all either monstrously complex facades hiding simple ideas, or deceptively simple perfumes masking an astonishing richness of detail.
Narcotico falls in the former category. The perfumer places an odd ‘upturned sod’ patchouli material, with nuances of sour soil, dry air, creeping rot, blood, metal, and leather, atop a relatively simple, powdered baby’s bottom of an amber-talc base. It’s like an unwashed wolf perched on top of a kitten. Everything interesting is happening inside the bounds of that patchouli material front-loaded into the first hour. Rather than beautiful, it smells half alluring, half foul. A thing of nature, yet also inorganic and strange.
Narcotico is an empty promise, though. It soon fizzles out into its quiet talc-like base, making you wonder if the first hour had happened at all. At the beginning, I was thinking that this was a truly different and original take on patchouli – a fertile cross between Noir Patchouli, Aromatics Elixir, and Vierges et Toreros – but its sudden cop out into a barely there amber affair feels like the ultimate bait and switch. Marescialla by Santa Maria Novella does what Narcotico promises to do – exorcism by patchouli – but for half the price.
Odor 93
Unlike Narcotico, Odor 93 is complex all the way through. Peel back any piece of its skin over its 24 hour trajectory and you’ll uncover a door cracked open to a different part of Narnia. Ostensibly a tuberose plunged into the gloom of soil, tobacco, and spice, it differs from other ‘darkened’ or ‘sullied’ white florals (Tubereuse Criminelle, Tubereuse III Animale, Daphne) by way of a clever and constant counterposing of notes that smell cheap and expensive, fun and salubrious, organic and chemical.
The opening is all Listerine, petrol, and bubblegum, but clearly also deeply floral, which is pleasantly confusing. There is a striking patchouli note that smells like earth – not patchouli, but soil, like a clump of dirt dug out of a forest floor, rich in humus and eau de decayed leaves. The tuberose itself is nightmarish in that it is syrupy sweet, bubblegummy, and a bit chemical, like a white floral cube of Turkish Delight peeled away from a plastic tray. But this in turn is compensated for by a rich, yellow, urinous-smelling narcissus and a horsey, honeyed wood-oud accord, which conspire to smell like the inside of a tobacco curing shed in summer. This is an extraordinary perfume. A bit hard to wear, yeah, but extraordinary.
On occasion, when I am smelling the very far drydown of Odor 93, I forget what I am wearing and it is only then that I understand this perfume to be built around a serious oriental-chypre base. It has the burnt-end ashiness of oakmoss (the dusty tobacco and patchouli acting in consort), a huge dollop of talc, and the bitterness of those ruby-red clove orientals that dominated the late 1980s, like Cinnabar and Opium. On balance, the perfume it most reminds me of is the older, original version of Sacrebleu by Parfums de Nicolai, another spicy-bubblegummy tuberose oriental, but one that lacks the complexity of Odor’s surround sound system. Odor 93 is an example of a perfume that, while it doesn’t suit my personal taste at all, is so unabashedly brilliant that anything other than a glowing review would be stupid.
L’Oblio
L’Oblio is a lovely, pleasing perfume, but it lives up to its name – oblivion, forgetfulness – by gliding over the curves and grooves of my brain and out my left ear like a half-remembered thought. And like my half-remembered thought, I am sure it was genius and that the world is all the poorer for not knowing it, but what can I do? It is gone now.
L’Oblio is one of those Meo Fusciuni perfumes that makes you understand how his entire oeuvre is divided into two textures – one ethereal and gossamer-light, the other as dense as wax. L’Oblio belongs to the former category. It is almost maddeningly vague, a whispering thing of spearmint breath, blue bottle Nivea, gum, green tea, Japanese stick incense, and the papery dustiness of old books (benzoin), all extremely pleasant and yet of no definite shape other than a faded memory of those cornstarch-dusted candy cigarettes they would give children in the 1980s. The sourness of old tea hangs around at the end, adding a musty, brackish note that fights back against the nothingness of the scent. Ultimately, though, it amounts to very little, like someone who has their hand raised last in a Teams meeting and realizes too late that everything interesting or important has already been said, so ends up muttering ‘I’d just like to add my support for what Allison said’.
Source of Samples: I purchased my Meo Fusciuni sample set from the Italian retailer, 50 ML, here.
Cover Image: Photo by davisuko on Unsplash
