All of Bruno Fazzolari’s perfumes are interesting. Some are interesting and beautiful (Au Dela) and some are interesting and edgy (Room 237). Seyrig is interesting and repellent.
It’s a total head trip, this perfume. It transports me on a whoosh of hairspray aldehydes to a bathroom in the 1970’s, where a man in Stetsons is combing his sideburns and sweet talking his own reflection, the bathroom mirror fogging up with the soapy fumes of his bath water and the copious amounts of Aqua Velva he’s just emptied onto himself.
There are other smells in this bathroom too. His wife has been in recently, the memory of a violent application of hairspray lingering with its chemical aftertaste, and his daughter with her precious lilac soaps taken out, used, and then carefully reinserted in their plastic wrapping, the gentle floral aroma floating through the bathroom fog and bringing a maudlin smile to Daddy’s face.
Under that, the clean-dirty stink that Luca Turin called “other people’s bathrooms”, this one’s aggressively sanitized atmosphere not only failing to eliminate the odors of the man’s morning ablutions but serving to accentuate them, the way that a can of air freshener will always make a stink worse. The chemically clean fizz of the bright blue urinal cake dropped hurriedly down the bog offends in its hyper-cleanliness, smelled as it must be against the gloomy backdrop of human waste.
Seyrig is a huge aldehydic floral. But these are not the creamy, pretty aldehydes of the old Chanels. Seyrig’s aldehydes – deliberately chemical, astringent, fused with herbs and flowers – mirror the style of certain Italian perfumers such as Angelo Pregoni (O’Driu) and Antonio Gardoni (Bogue) who use aldehydes in a knowing, ironic kind of way, as a sort of inverted commas on a trip down memory lane peopled by fantastic Big Bitch aldehydes from Arpege all the way to No. 22. These guys make aldehydes butch, not bitch. Subversive and ugly, they come out of the bottle swinging at you with all the pent-up fury of a Travis Bickle.
With Seyrig, Bruno Fazzolari layers these hostile aldehydes over a pretty red mandarin, some fey rose de mai, and a soapy syringa note, hardly notes possessed of the strength of character needed to stand up to the assault. A musky base brings up the rear, in every sense of the word. It’s not dirty per se, but it does bring a feeling of something unclean. The florals are besides the point here – they float prettily through the perfume – but do little else. The main impression is of a bathroom aggressively cleaned with Cillit Bang and Toilet Duck but with the lingering undertow of the collected smells – pleasant and unpleasant – that we humans leave behind.
I absolutely hate it. Every minute it was on my skin was a trial. But I have to hand it to the perfumer – it’s a perfume that painted a crystal clear image in my head, and given that most perfumes leave only a blurred, vague impression, that’s really saying something. In fact, in terms of transportative immediacy, its power is matched only by something like L’Air du Desert Marocain. Just don’t make me wear it, please.
