Claire

Though I own Bois de Violette and the original Dolce Vita, I really only have eyes for Feminité du Bois.  I think this is because it is the only one that achieves a perfect balance between sparkle and gloom.  God, the opening never fails to rouse me. 

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I’d taken myself off the Francesca Bianchi PR sample distribution list when I moved to Africa in 2023, but by coincidence, my husband discovered the brand all by himself while on a business trip to Montenegro.  There, in a small perfume shop on the main drag of Podgorica, he stumbled upon what he called ‘one of the best smells he had ever smelled’ but couldn’t remember which one it was, so he ordered the full set directly from Francesca Bianchi’s site.  All independently of me, of course, which is par for the course in my family.  

Anyway, he went through all 15 (more?) samples in the set and was sadly never able to ID the perfume he’d fallen in love with in Montenegro.  On the other hand, it allowed me to smell some Francesca Bianchi samples I hadn’t smelled before, hence this quickfire round of reviews.

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La Rhapsodie Noir

Parfums Dusita is a brand that does its best work in the herbal-aromatic vein (see: Issara, Erawan, Le Pavillon d’Or) because the perfumer, Pissara Umavijani, brings a Thai sensibility full of exotic herbs, woods, and spices to bear on traditional Western tropes, such as the fougère or the ‘oriental’ (ironically, a model created by the Western gaze upon anything east of Istanbul).   And it is this touch that makes La Rhapsodie Noir sing. 

La Rhapsodie Noire comes by its coffee note honestly, via the interplay of sunburnt lavender and sage that produces a similar effect to the topnotes of Eau Noire (Dior), minus the immortelle, which removes all danger of maple syrup.  The impression is therefore of a waft of dark, fresh coffee on the air on a hillside in Southern France, rather than the sticky, burnt ‘coffee shop’ glop that plagues most coffee fragrances.  It is gently herbal and aromatic rather than gourmand, which is what makes it a really elegant wear.  

Belying the complex notes list, I find this fragrance to be almost stylishly simple.  The grainy coffee darkness loosens gradually into a creamy, medicinal tonka bean paste, itself quite aromatic and rugged.  It is ultimately similar to other aromatic-herbal tonka bean fragrances I love, like Eau des Baux (L’Occitane) and Lothair (Penhaligon’s), their main charm lying in that tug of war between the spicy vanillic warmth of tonka and the insistently sharp prickle of aromatic notes (cypress, lavender, black tea).  La Rhapsodie Noire is a more refined distant cousin of these scents, but a member of the family nonetheless.    

Montri

A stunning oud perfume that – for once – is bringing something new to the oud conversation rather than repeating what other, cleverer people have already said.  I have to spray this over and over again to understand what’s truly going on here.  There is something of the briny, inky plastic funk of Le Labo’s Oud 27, but this is immediately smothered with the scent of dying roses, their slightly overripe, fleshy scent walking lockstep with the deep, fungal-brown smell of the rot in the heartwood of the Aquilaria tree. 

Unlike the goaty, bleu cheese sourness of the oud in Oudh Infini, the oud here is not animalic or creamy, but dry and deeply fragrant, like the aroma of oud wood heated gently over a burner.  This accord is buffeted by wafts of gentle spices (saffron, nutmeg) and a sort of dried fruit nuance, but these notes stay in the background, their main role being to hustle the oud forward.  Towards the end, the fragrant aroma of the oud wood grafts itself seamlessly onto a soapy, dried orris root powder that feels almost like a clean, white musk, but isn’t.  It’s a soft, supple leather, clean of any animal fats or flesh.

The whole thing is set ablaze by a rubbery oregano note that performs the same role as in Ambre Sultan, which is to say it lends a spine-stiffeningly herbal, fuel-like twang to a mélange that might otherwise be too sweet or too soft.  The oregano note makes Montri strangely edible, in a savoury kind of way.  Parts of the perfume also smell like gripe water or hawthorn, a nuance I am crazy about.  As time wears on, I recognize a distant kinship between Montri and Oudh Osmanthus (Mona di Orio), linked by that edible but watery dill-like nuance. 

I think Montri is one of the best oud-themed perfumes to be released in the niche space for years (probably since the brand’s own Oudh Infini, which is now discontinued) for three reasons.  First, despite being a rose-oud, it smells like a new variety.  Second, it is full of character.  Third, it smells great as a personal perfume – neither shockingly animalic or too out there to wear.  I really love this and it has gone straight to the top of my wish list.   

Rosarine

A special occasion rose fragrance that is beautiful from every angle.  Because it is neither strange nor pretty, it risks being overlooked by indie connoisseurs in the first case and by casual wearers in the second.  Though the notes list seems to promise a lychee-rose in the spirit of Delina (Parfums de Marly) or Chloe, the first few minutes of this fragrance puts forth a massive, truffled red-black rose that tilts at black velvet. 

Underscored by a dry, grappa-like ambrette musk that adds some sparkle, this remains a rather serious, lush rose affair, one that is really quite vintage in style.  It is not light-hearted or particularly girlish, despite the slight rosewater and raspberry jam notes flitting around.   The drydown is earthy and slightly cocoa-ish, with plenty of leafy patchouli and benzoin opening up new pockets of darkness at the edge of the pulpy red rose.  I imagine that anyone captivated by Eau Capitale (Diptyque) or Portrait of a Lady (Frederic Malle) but wishing for something more focused on the beauty of a lush rose as found in nature, would love Rosarine. 

Pelagos   

Pelagos is a very interesting perfume because I thought I knew what genre this was until I didn’t.  Perhaps it was a perfumer’s answer to a riddle in a drinking game – something like, how do you take orris butter, bergamot, jasmine, tonka bean, and benzoin, and turn it all into something that smells initially like a marine fougere?   It is astonishing to me that Pelagos smells so much like a fresh, almost aquatic men’s fragrance in its first minutes.  It is sharp, aromatic, and somehow deeply ‘blue’ in tonality, despite the clear presence of pine.  But even in the topnotes, I can smell how this is indeed a different animal, because there is also a waxy-herbal note here that smells like beeswax or freshly milled pencils.  Indeed, this was my first clue that that Pelagos is actually an iris fragrance and not a marine fougere.

Of course, wait half an hour for all the spiky aromatics and citruses to die back, and the fact that this is an iris fragrance becomes obvious to the point I feel kind of stupid for thinking it was anything but.  The fragrant, silvery, paste-like scent of orris butter spreads out on the tongue like fat from an A5 wagyu steak.  It is an expensive aroma. 

I suppose that the reason why this iris masqueraded (to my nose at least) as a marine fougere so successfully must be that the fragrance plays around with the extreme minerality of iris – its wet cement, salty dough, and stone dust nuances – to the exclusion of all the material’s more traditionally pleasing aspects, meaning its powder, suede, lipstick, or violet-like tones. There is also a citric, high-toned edge to the iris that might be interpreted as masculine, or at least herbal or green, though the scent remains this cool, foggy grey colour in my mind’s eye.  I have not seen this side of iris since Iris Bleu Gris (Maître Parfumeur et Gantier).   

Funnily enough, for a scent so cold and sharp, it finishes up in a sort of cloudy, mammalian warmth that might or might not be an amber resin with a dash of civet or ambergris.  The contrast between the balsamic roundness of the base and the ice pick chill of the rest make Pelagos a very interesting fragrance to wear.  I find Pelagos to be a unique, or at least it seems to be so framed against my admittedly thin experience with masculine fragrances.  

Source of Samples:  Sent to me kindly free of charge by the brand for review.  My thoughts are my own. 

Cover Image:  Photo by Kseniia Ilinykh on Unsplash

To be frank, 90% of the perfumes I smell are disappointing, if not downright awful.  Which is why I’m starting a series dedicated to reviewing (or should that be ‘roasting’) the duds. 

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Living on the equator has its advantages – year-round warmth, sun, lush greenery, the endless availability of mangoes – but heading into my second autumn in Africa, I do find myself longing for the change of seasons.  With only minute differences between summer and winter in the Tropics, the only leaves you see turning brown are the ones offed by drought. 

Though I certainly don’t want to fetishize autumn in Northern Europe, being all too well acquainted with its cold, dreary reality, there are certain scenes that occupy the no man’s land between fantasy and half-remembered moments of perfection.  My father’s military line of silver birches, for example, starkly framed against the burnt red of his maples.  Walks along an empty Curracloe Beach, numb red hands thrust into the ends of scarves. The wan, silvery quality of skies backlit by a source of light rumored by Irish weathercasters to be the sun.  

Because I am more Morrissey than Taylor Swift, I tend to lean into the bleakness rather than try to bank it down with the perfumed equivalent of a pumpkin spice latte.  Something about my perfumes also needs to smell like an ending – a bit bitter, dry, emotionally remote. 

Chêne by Serge Lutens is a fragrance I think about far more than I wear.  Such a disarmingly simple smell, yet so affecting.  Lacquered school pencils split open at the root and inhaled deeply – a dense, ‘packed’ aromascape of varnish, cedar, and powder, coated in a soft, waxy mien that hovers between intense sweetness and intense bitterness in the same way a raisin does.  It smells boozy but in a dry, aromatic way, more the honk of volatile wood esters effervescing from a freshly split log than a glass of whiskey.  I know this makes it sound like a dramatic scent, but really, there is a stillness to this scent that makes you bend your head to listen.  Smelling Chêne feels a bit like watching one of those elaborate sand drawings being made, layers of dun-, ochre- and taupe-colored sand gently swept in and over each other until a vague shape begins to emerge.  

Though I originally said that English Oak and Hazelnut by Jo Malone smelled like deep winter, I take that back.  Similarly minimalistic and stark as Chêne – albeit less poetic – there is something quite bleak about this perfume that matches the crisp crunch of leaves underfoot and bleachy skies of a late autumn walk. 

Tabac Tabou by Parfum d’Empire mines the connective tissue between immortelle and narcissus, a richly stinky inter-webbing of burnished, sunlit molecules redolent of sunburnt hay, damp pouch tobacco, honey, and crushed wildflower stalks and manages to smell gloriously faded just two minutes in on the skin.  I don’t know how the perfumer (Marc-Antoine Corticchiato) pulled this off, but Tabac Tabou smells both wildly naturalistic – like you’ve just been rolling around in a clean stable full of hay, plant semen, dried wildflowers, daisy chains, and leather or horse hair blankets – and polished (staid almost), fully at home on an older lady playing canasta in a tearoom on a Tuesday afternoon.  I think this is because the vivid, animalic undercarriage of the scent, full of pungent, velvety musks and old honey, has some of its horny aliveness choked out of it by its chypric dog collar.  I love this scent, but sometimes it is perfect and sometimes it makes my skin crawl. 

United in immortelle, Tabac Tabou shares some of its wilted, sunburnt brownness with The Afternoon of a Faun by État Libre d’Orange, but little of its warmth.  This one muscles its way into the green rose chypre category with a vibe halfway between a drenched forest and a bowl full of crushed orris roots.  It recalls the burnt coffee grounds and hairspray topnotes of a badly turned vintage No. 19 pure parfum I once owned.  Though the immortelle note smells like sugared hay boiled down in whiskey, it also smells savory and dry, like celery salt.  Wearing it feels like a pair of fabulous, wide-cut corduroy slacks that are both comfortable and capable of making you look like Marlene Dietrich.  

Le Smoking by DSH Parfums makes me feel sad in a way that I like – a self-indulgent type of sadness, the one you wallow in for a few hours because you know you can set it aside just as easily as you brought it on.  The galbanum in Le Smoking is not the fresh, resinous green bell pepper sort but one that smells murky, poisonous, and cold, like smoke drifting across a window pane.  Lots of dusty tobacco, vetiver, and oakmoss together create a pleasantly stale, acrid accord, a column of ash waiting to drop off a cigarette.  A jaded, lived in ‘brown’ scent that feels right for right now. 

These days I want spice, too, but only if it’s as dry as a bone and sits somewhere on the tonal slide between griege and porridge on a Pantone chart.  Heaven Can Wait by Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, with its juxtaposition between cold, rooty iris and warm spice, fits the bill.  Despite the clove and plum, this is a fragrance that feels cool and standoffish.  Initially, it recalls the gripe-water musks of L’Eau d’Hiver and the thin, hawthorn-ish suede of Cuir d’Ange, with a faint brush of Superstitious‘ green-copper acid over top.  In the drydown, something dry and gippy ‘catches’ at the corners of the scent, threatening to unspool the silk. The freshly-poured cement aspect of cashmeran, perhaps, or the raw, parnsippy character of the orris lingering long after the topnotes have burned off.  More greige than Dior’s Gris Dior.

Eyes Closed by Byredo dresses up a dove-grey iris suede (very much like Dior Homme) in a fine coating of baking spices, mostly cinnamon and cardamom.  This accord is distinguished in the opening by a remarkable carrot seed material that gives it an earthy, musky ‘cloudiness’ – like someone coming in and smudging all the lines on a charcoal drawing.  It smells rather like the dry ingredients of a carrot cake or a Christmas cake before all the booze, melted butter, and sozzled dried fruit get poured in.  I like this fragrance because it is arid and unsweet, the richness of its spice mélange untethered to any gooey basenotes, cutting it free to float on the air.  I find it to be pleasingly masculine.  But it is too intense – almost unpleasant – to smell straight from the skin, and so powerful that the scent gets a bit monotonous after a few hours.  That’s why the way you wear this one counts.  Like Chergui and Patchouli 24, a discreet dab on the end of your scarf or on one knuckle is enough to scent your entire ecosystem.  

Only if the hidden flower in Fleur Cachée by Anatole Lebreton is immortelle does this scent’s title make sense – though it is more likely to be the intensely syrupy-dry-curried-celery aspect of fenugreek seed that is giving immortelle than immortelle itself.  Think of a flavor that marries the medicinal warmth of nutmeg to the cool, watery herbal feel of dill or celery, and that is fenugreek.  Anyway, this smells like the inside of a sauna constructed entirely of sandalwood – dry, ‘baked’, almost sandy in texture.  There is a bold flourish of coffee grounds, which, combined with the hot sauna aura, makes me think of the original Eau Noire (Dior) or even the magnificent Santal Nabataea by Mona di Orio.  In the end, I don’t find anything remotely floral or vanilla in Fleur Cachée – this is simply a stunningly dry, but also sweaty-spicy-vegetal sandal in the vein of one of my all-time favorite perfumes, Santal de Mysore by Serge Lutens, just a lot airier (and cheaper).     

Though I do not want the cosseting sweetness or fullness of tonka, vanillas, or tobaccos just yet, I will take the more restrained takes.  Lothair by Penhaligon’s calls to mind my daughter’s recent exclamation at seeing one of the men on Love is Blind UK, ‘Oh my God, he’s so ugly.  He looks Scottish,’ which, coming from a charming little airhead who thinks France is in Asia, is funny.  I can kind of see what she means, though, because Lothair is a perfume that smells Scottish for no apparent reason other than I think the initial wallop of metallic lavender, starchy rhubarb, black pepper, and milky cedar is what I imagine a thick, purplish carpeting of thistle or heather on highlands to smell like.  The punchy, herbal opening smells hoary and old-mannish to me in the best way possible, like an entrance hall thick with the smell of waxed jackets and tweeds and galoshes (and perhaps the odd bit of Lynx too, for good measure).  High country pursuits, then, which, while not typically part of the cultural ‘scent’ lexicon for a woman in her forties from a working-class Irish background, still occupy a shape in the scent library of my mind.  Lothair brings in some tonka bean towards the end, but it never smells creamy, just aromatic and kind of manly. 

People say they smell fig and black tea in this, and that may be true, but I smell more of those hot metal bars on the old electric Calor gas heaters and the thick, fuzzy scent of wet wool fibers fluffing up when exposed to the intense heat confined to the 2cm radius of the bars.  Kind of Gris Clair-ish but better, in that the metallic lavender-tonka combo keeps the screechiness to a minimum and clothes it all in a rich, dry, yet almost lactonic cedar that smells like a special type of incense only the rich can afford.  It’s all very Sean Connery – gravel in the streets, butter in the sheets. 

L’Air de Rien by Miller Harris is a perfume that I struggled with for years before finally giving in and learning to – if not love – then crave in small doses the very special thing this perfume does in marrying the ‘greasy scalp’ horror of costus to the inky, saline dust of tree moss, a hot metal spoon, a puffy plethora of unholy musks, the only neroli note in the world that doesn’t smell like citrus peel and soap, and an unsettlingly unsweet amber-vanilla.  Old books and cranked up radiators at the start of winter have the same funk to them, as do the heads of children and small animals.  Add clove and you edge closer to Fiore d’Ambra by Profumum Roma, another perfume that mixes the innocent with the foul until your brains scramble inside your skull.  It smells like a freshly bathed human stuffed inside a three-day-old pinstripe suit, or being forced to participate in someone else’s kink for unwashed teeth.  Unbearably intimate and yet utterly human in all its weirdness.  Autumn is the perfect time to wear this, or whenever it becomes cold enough to start bathing every second day.   

Like Chêne, Bohea Bohème by Mona di Orio is one of those fragrances occupies far more space in my head than it does on my skin.  It doesn’t lend itself to easy classification, which is, I guess, part of the reason I find myself thinking about it even when I am a whole continent away from my bottle of it.  Essentially, it is a minimally smoky, peppery tea scent that stretches itself over a sparse structure of wood, herbs, and greenery.  But the scent distinguishes itself with an opening bristling with camphor and mint, providing the wear with a surprising jolt of bitterness that one can almost feel at the back of the tongue.  The Listerine-like bitterness almost always fools me into thinking – absentmindedly –  that I have sprayed one of my more toothpaste-y tuberose perfumes recently and simply forgotten about it.  

The drydown is a marvel, the woody tea and camphor levelling out into a note of sweet, papery tobacco and sun-scorched hay that takes on an unexpectedly rustic feel, diverging from the cool, urban aesthetic of the first half of the fragrance.  Bohea Bohème does not have any heavy amber or vanilla weighing down the tea, just a surprisingly weightless benzoin that shifts through the air like a ribbon of smoke from a far-off campfire.

Weightlessness and transparency are also thoughtful features of Le Pavillon d’Or by Dusita Parfums, a fragrance that carries the green-gold-lilac duskiness of post-harvest meadows and field margins and hedgerows inside of it.  Mint, iris, and honeysuckle combine to form a fresh, green opening that sometimes reminds me of Chanel. No. 19 and sometimes of Diorella (and sometimes of neither).  There is an illusion of galbanum minus the bitterness, or of vetiver without its dankness. The main note here is fig leaf, which would explain the faintly milky quality to the greenness, but there’s none of the urinous quality that often sullies the vibrant smell of fig leaf.  These opening notes are quickly coated with an overlay of what smells to me like the sweet, musty alfalfa grass notes (half hay, half Quaker’s oats) borrowed from one of my favorite Dusita perfumes, Erawan, but minus that scent’s dusky cocoa. There is also, here and there, a touch of Chanel’s Poudre Universelle Libre – a discreetly-perfumey, buff-colored skein of powder dusted over the scent’s cheekbones.

And, of course, there is always Iris Silver Mist by Serge Lutens.  This is not perfume.  It is either art or a form of water boarding, but it’s not a perfume. Iris Silver Mist teeters on a tightrope between beauty and brutality. The first blast out of the gate is of the purest iris root note ever created.  I can almost taste the smell on the back of my tongue – mud, earth, metal, roots, dry ice pumped from a machine at a festival.  Again, not perfume, not really.  Raw potatoes soaking in ice cold water, rotting carrot tops, and the acrid fug of alcohol fumes rolling off a Poitín still.  There is also the high-toned acid sting of fresh urine from a baby’s nappy but devoid of any of the warm, sweet-sour honey and hay overtones that makes baby pee such a friendly smell.  This is cold and denatured, ureic acid grown in a sterile lab.  Nothing of human origin.

Iris Silver Mist is not pleasant but it stirs my soul in a way that more pleasant perfumes do not.  It makes me think of uncomfortable scenarios – teenagers facing the wall at the end of the Blair Witch Project, the tops of those dark pine trees swaying in the wind in Twin Peaks every time Coop entered the Red Room in the Black Lodge, the guy in nothing but y-fronts and a WW2 gas mask striding across a corn field at the end of episode 3 of True Detective.  Think of basically anything that has ever chilled your soul, and that’s Iris Silver Mist.  It is a work of art.  Art in a gimp mask, yes, but still, art. 

Source of Samples:  All purchased by me in either sample or full bottle form at one point or another. 

Cover Image:  Photo by John Price on Unsplash

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

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