I recently changed jobs, which requires two six-hour daily commutes per week, meaning I start off in the cold darkness and return under the same conditions at night. Though I know that this too will pass – and there will be, eventually, light – it is difficult to keep my spirits from flagging. What I need right now are perfumes that perform the same trick for me as natural light. And these are six of the best.
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.
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
Read more: Parfums Dusita: New Reviews Read more: Parfums Dusita: New Reviews
The Arabian Heritage Collection by Areej Le Doré is a deliberately minimalist collection, focused on the three materials that are not only critical to Arabian or mukhallat style perfumery but happen to be the recurring motifs of each Areej Le Doré collection – ambergris (Al Ambar), oud (Al Oud) and sandalwood (Al Sandal). As always, when I smell an Areej Le Doré collection, I try to evaluate what I am smelling through the lens of audience (who is this for?), identity (which hat is Russian Adam wearing now?), and the newcomer’s virgin nose (how would an ordinary person experience this?).
Confession: I am not fond of cedar as a note in perfumery. Perhaps because these days it is so often paired with vetiver and Iso E Super to produce that piercing sucker punch of ‘woody-fresh’ masculines that it has become tainted in my mind, or perhaps because the essential oil itself can be pungent. I can count on two fingers the cedar-heavy fragrances I love – Feminité du Bois by Serge Lutens and Cèdre Sambac by Hermès – but now, perhaps, I can tentatively add Kashmir as a third.
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