Epona is pure gorgeousness. Though I do have an equestrian background myself, horsey perfumes can be a little bit too on the nose with the mane accord – Arabian Horse by Pierre Guillaume, Corpus Equus by Naomi Goodsir, for example – for people sans horsey background to really enjoy. Epona sidesteps the trap of literalness by being a fully-fledged perfume built around an agrestic scene rather than a hammer hitting the pony button over and over again. Let me put it another way – this is a horsey perfume for someone whose idea of horse heaven is more Chanel’s genteelly-saddle-soapy Cuir de Russie or a horse seen through the soft glow of a Tiffany lamp than the actual animal itself.
The opening, for example. With its rush of astringent violet and iris ionones, you are plunged into a forest glade with spring flowers and roots pushing up through the frozen soil. Rather than sweet, it smells chalky, like stamens and roots split open, diffused in a cloud of wood or floral esters that make my head swim as effectively as waving a newly opened bottle of grappa under my nose. Emotionally remote flowers in cold storage, plus the beginnings of something mossy and brown-ish that makes me think of Jolie Madame or Miss Balmain (Balmain). On reflection, this makes sense to me because there is something about Balmain perfumes, especially in extrait form, that smells modern and old at the same time.
Past the chilled ionone rush of the topnotes, there develops a sweet, slightly smoky-grassy note that I first felt was hay, but am confident now is incense, and specifically an unlit stick of nag champa. This dusty-powdery accord comes in so closely behind the chalky violet-iris opening that it momentarily confuses the direction of the perfume – you begin to wonder, is this an austere Miss Balmain-ish thing or are we going in the direction of a New Age momma? I got my son to smell my arm, and he said immediately, old church.
And for a while there, Epona does smell ‘old’ in a really good way, like the wood in an old church, dusty old clothes in a trunk to explore, and so on. What I appreciate about Epona, though, is that this is just one stage in its development, because just when I begin to wonder where the horse in this picture is, the perfume begins its slow slide into the outdoors, all sun-warned hay, narcissus, alfalfa, woodruff, a light starchy leather, and the softly ‘rude’ aromas suggestive of, first, a pasture, and then, finally, a horse. But only the vaguest suggestion of a horse.
The trajectory from cool to warm is so smooth, you barely register what’s happening. Though mostly a pastoralist aroma-scope, the warm, boozy aura makes me think of a childhood spent walking into rooms where the adults are or were drinking glasses of a slightly smoky Irish whiskey. Perhaps it is the ionones creating a familiar sweet, newspaper-whiskey tonality (subliminally Dzongkha-ish in my memory palace), but either way, it is extremely pleasant.
So extremely pleasant, in fact, that I can’t stop imagining that Epona – in this phase at least – smells like the Caronade the way I remember it, fully loaded with Mousse de Saxe and those complex, brandy-ish De Laire amber bases. Now, it is no small feat to pull off an approximation of an older Caron extrait (En Avion and Nuit de Noel are the ones that jump to mind here), and I have no idea if that’s even something Liz Moores was aiming for, but that is exactly what I feel I am smelling here – a complex, mossy-smoky-sweet leathery floral that is half spice and half face power.
Of course, nothing this beautiful lasts forever, but I enjoy the hell out of this Caronade phase until it trails off into a persistent honey note that smells like a pissy narcissus material to me, not a million miles from the drydown of Tabac Tabou (Parfums d’Empire).
This is by far my favourite of the Papillon perfumes.
Source of Sample: Gratis sample sent to me for review by Liz Moores.
Cover Image: Photo by Bozhin Karaivanov on Unsplash