Seahorse from Zoologist is a sunny evocation of the sea, celebrating the myriads of colour and texture of a coral garden. It has a floral tone, but this is treated with citrus, herbal, and cool spicy notes to create a complete picture. It dares to envisage a bursting white garden of blooms – solar floral notes that scintillate in the sunlight with heady aroma. Against the flows of cool seawater, it might remind you of the nicest days at the beach, the wind collecting and carrying scent on its voyage, calming the effect of persistent sunlight. It is the best of our happiest beach memories; generous, easy to love, and undemanding.
If crunchy green herbs and spicy florals are more to your taste, Cap d'Antibes (Eight and Bob) is a tenacious blend of salty vetiver, and sizzling green violet leaf – transforming a familiar category into something powerful and impressive – demonstrating that the best aquatics lean on other styles. Towards realism, Heeley’s Sel Marin offers the most naturalistic rendition from amongst the aquatic category, and offers the miracle of pristine ocean water – a languid and salty seaside fantasy in scent.
Tauer's Phtaloblue is the thinker's aquatic, adding a clever blend of tonka bean, sweet fennel, and lavender to ambery marine effects, which adds a plush texture to the fragrance, with a faint suggestion of the gourmand. Squid (Zoologist) maintains this overall feeling, and its creativity is abundant: the eerie stillness of a quiet ocean is interrupted by crushing waves. It is a shimmering and undulating scent, filled with salty incense mingling with algae and spices to replicate the scent of sea spray. Salicylates recall a skin coated in a fine saline mist, blushing in the sunlight. It is the point where blue turns to black. Finally, Megamare by Orto Parisi is best described as a sublime thunderstorm: an intense aquatic of waves and enveloping sea mist with a turbulent core of amber and musk. It is powerful and impersonal, its melange of musky notes for a surface that is cool to the touch, like metal coated in frost.
