September 2024

Luce

Luce is like a plain girl whose face suddenly transforms when she smiles.  Full of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments that shuffle so quietly underneath its sweet, minty beeswax skin that you’d be forgiven for writing it off as an amber, this is a scent that rewards close study.  My first impression is of sugared aniseed and vinyl set against a dark green backdrop of fir trees, underscored with a touch of adiposal fat coagulating on a dead animal.  Somehow, this works – a multi-dimensional taste at the back of your tongue that draws all the bickering fresh, bitter, fatty, medicinal, and plastic notes to a warm, soft bosom that stifles all sound, let alone conflict.  

It is only later, when Luce has moved on from its camphoraceous to its long, sweet, powdery drydown that I realize that this is an essay on benzoin.  No wonder people look at this and think ‘amber’.  But to me, benzoin on its own smells at once more subtle and more complex than when it is placed in an amber accord with vanilla and labdanum.  Here, shorn and unadorned, it smells uniquely of itself – slightly ‘gippy’, like dampened potato flour, minty-camphoraceous, and of course, like incense, specifically unlit papiers d’armenie, those little strips of porous paper dipped in benzoin resinoid.  This accord is attractively moldy or even ‘musty’, a quality your brain doesn’t normally associate pleasantly with a perfume but switches gears when it smells the same thing in a library full of old books, wafting decaying lignin spores into the ether. 

Much of the same in the drydown, except for a hawthornish suede accent – think elegant Chamois glove leather – that lends the bookish dust some much needed structure.  There is also, in my mind, a memory link between the hawthorn note and the anise note at the beginning, something hauntingly gripe-watery, sweet, and herbal.  

Luce feels very original to me, but of course, as I write and sniff, three fragrances with similar vibes jump to mind, namely; Guerlain’s Bois d’Armenie (those sweet, dusty incense burning papers), Mona di Orio’s Bohea Boheme (a slightly bitter, camphoraceous benzoin-tea scent with a powdery drydown), and Guerlain’s Cuir Beluga (the same white, creamy hawthorn suede).  Quiet scents all, but Luce is quieter still.  In fact, sometimes, I strain to hear its little voice at all.  I rarely ask for scents to be stronger than they are – because someone somewhere will inevitably hear that as a plea for more Norlimbanol or Clearwood – but in the case of Luce, I would love the volume turned up by 30%, please.  

Notturno

Notturno is bad, but doesn’t even have the grace to be memorably bad.  It is just bad in a ‘thin, doesn’t smell great, and definitely doesn’t belong in the catalogue of an artisan perfumer’ kind of way.  Unlike my other Meo Fusciuni samples, which I use to the last drop either to make sure I fully understand them or because I enjoy smelling them, Notturno is the only one that lolls around on my dresser, half full, until I inevitably spot it, wonder if I’ll like that, spray some on and instantly remember that not only do I not like it at all, but I clearly can’t remember a single thing about it, hence the cycle. 

Here’s why it’s bad – not why I think it’s bad but why it’s objectively bad –  it is really nothing more than a single rum ether stuck on top of a burnt sugar, Maltol-sticky wood aromachemical that smells like a section excised from By the Fireplace and spread out in a thin schmear on your skin.  I hate this note, primarily because it is a grandstanding gesture rather than an idea, but also because rum itself is cringe beyond the age of 19.  For all of the 30 seconds it lasts, 5 seconds of it smells impressively like real rum (though we’ve established that that’s not the plus anyone thinks it is) and 25 seconds like the little bottles of rum flavoring you buy to put in cakes. 

And that’s it, that’s the best part of this scent, done and dusted in under half a minute.  What follows this damp squib of an opening is the chemical litany of whatever molecules people are stringing together these days to suggest leather, wood, or tobacco to an increasingly gullible (or nose blind) audience.  Notturno means nocturnal, and from the reviews, it seems that most people are buying into a fantasy of whatever nocturnal means to them rather than smelling the scent for what it truly is.  For once, the perfume isn’t the one with projection issues. 

Source of Samples:  I purchased my Meo Fusciuni sample set from the Italian retailer, 50 ML, here.  

Cover Image:  Photo by Jack Asis on Unsplash

#1 Nota di Viaggio (Rites de Passage)

The opening is pure Italian apothecary chic – a veritable cacophony of brackish herbs, aged citrus, and homemade toothpaste underscored by a streak of medicated foot powder and ye olde throat pastilles.  Not unpleasant per se, but a jumbled up wall of smell that I associate with many of the openings of Italian artisanal perfumery, like Mem and Noun from Bogue, Lafeogrigio or Ladamo by O’Driu, or the more aromatic scents of Annette Neuffer (not Italian, but the style is similar). 

Once this rather harsh, resinous basil-ade dies back, however, the rest of the scent is a wonderful chiaroscuro featuring a creamy, vegetal patchouli-vetiver accord, made more oily and bitter with a heady dose of rosewood – velvety, lush, dark – shot through with a bright floral sherbet of ylang and other flowers.  The contrast between the salubrious, serious basenotes that tilt towards the bowels of the earth and the effervescent, slightly ‘Love Hearts’-ish accord is delightful.  It’s deep, aromatic and soulful, but at the same time, filled with slivers of dancing light.  I am determined to buy my husband a bottle of this for his next birthday.  

#2 Nota di Viaggio (Shukran)

This is probably the most immediately arresting of the trio.  It smells so strongly of spearmint and citrus soap in the beginning that I feel slightly sick but also like I’m just out of the shower.  This feeling is confusing to me, in that I like its unusual freshness but dislike when the line between perfumery and toothpaste is crossed so decisively, and all within the first few moments.  I begin to like this accord better once the glare on the mint softens a bit, allowing me to smell the other green, aromatic notes, like lemongrass and the gentler, honeyed hay-like tones of the chamomile. 

I fool myself into thinking that this is heading in a Moroccan mint tea direction when suddenly, a boldly spiced tobacco leaf note swims into view, and from then on, I smell nothing but.  The tobacco accent is light, untoasted, blond almost, but also so tightly threaded with clove, cinnamon, and star anise that it smells like a very unsweet gingerbread – a pain d’epices they might serve in a medieval monastery, where honey or dried fruits are considered a mortal sin and kept far away from the kitchen.  If you’ve ever smelled Tan d’Epices by Andree Putman, then this is similar – indeed, so much so that I would hazard a guess that the same material has been used here, or the tobacco leaf-spice accord built out in the same way. 

But before I can start fully warming up to #2, it is gone.  Poof!  And I mention that because performance beyond a four hour window is important to some.  On the other hand, if you love Eau d’Hadrien by Annick Goutal or Eau d’Orange Verte by Hermes, for example, and treat them for what they really are – a ‘parfum du matin’ until you put on something more serious later on in the day – then #2 Nota di Viaggio (Shukran) could be a worthy addition to your wardrobe.  It is unusual in that it takes extreme freshness in a thoroughly different direction, with mint and spicy blond tobacco substituting for the more standard citrus and moss. 

#3 Nota di Viaggio (Ciavuru d’Amuri) 

Something about this perfume is so incredibly nostalgic to me that I am not sure if I can review it objectively.  Perhaps it is because it smells green, aromatic, and gently powdered to begin with, making me think of mimosa or Cassie flower, as well as the figs my Montenegrin mother in law picks from her tree before drying them and rolling them in a mixture of cornstarch and powdered sugar.  Or perhaps it is because there is a ylang material in there that smells like the slightly dry, smoky leather accent in Cuir de Russie or the post-2015 Mitsouko.  Whatever it is, it brings me right back to when I lived in the Mediterranean (Sicily, Montenegro), and, more than a place, to a time in my life when I was beginning to really discover perfume (or really great perfume), with that starchy ylang-mimosa like material acting as my own personal Proustian madeleine.   

Objectively speaking, though, what I think makes this perfume great is that the perfumer connects the scent of ripe figs and the coarse, fruity creaminess of ylang via a note of rubber.  Fig perfumes can be woody and coconutty (Philosykos) or astringent and pissy-fresh (Ninfeo Mio) but if you focus intently enough, you will notice that they are always, always slightly rubbery underneath the sweet, green freshness.  A milky, sappy kind of rubber.  The fig in #3 is far less green, woody, or coconutty than other examples, in that it smells warm and closely textured like the flesh inside the fruit, and as clean like a fig note in a clarifying shampoo.  But there is a lingering undercurrent – subtle but present – of a gentle rubber, dusted with a fine white powder of unknown origin. 

This accent connects so seamlessly with the grapey, fuel-y rubbery-ness of that ylang that you hardly notice that the core note has shifted from fig to ylang, from fruit to flower.  I think it’s because these notes, that we think of as creamy or liquid, are quite dry here, drained of their essential humidity as the scent progresses.  But there’s more to this scent than this skillful transition.  These core accords are bathed in this gentle, herbal aura that is half sugared aniseed, and half resin dust – the kind of resins that have a cleansing, antiseptic character, like elemi or pine sap.  #3 is not too much of one thing or the other, in fact, its defining character being that of having no fixed character at all.  This is an ethereal changeling that makes you chase it down one leg of a maze and then another, smelling of completely different things from one wear to the next.  Out of all the Nota di Viaggio series, #3 is the one that has charmed me the most. 

Source of Samples:  I purchased my Meo Fusciuni sample set from the Italian retailer, 50 ML, here. 

Cover Image:  Photo by Federico Burgalassi on Unsplash