A tasting menu! Start with Like This (Etat Libre d'Orange), an amazing medley reminiscent of the bucolic Scottish Highlands with fruity whisky, honey-sweet tangerine, and savoury wafts of roasted ginger-spiced pumpkin. It is the scent of home and of comfort, of the Scottish hillside in the lazy springtime, a sweetly spiced fragrance ruptured with unique orange notes. Nanatopia (BTSO) follows this trajectory. Yes, a flash of banana opens, its smell evocative enough to produce an image of the slender yellow fruit, spotted brown and highly suggestive of the tropical. But once you’ve locked into this fruity feature, impressions of clove, rum, nutmeg, and vanilla fill the space of this perfume with generous warmth and decadence. Nanatopia is a fragrance set upon recreating the scent of banana bread, which is the ideal perfumed study with its perfect blend of fruity, nutty, bready, syrupy, boozy, and sugary-molasses notes. Indeed, this isn’t a banana fragrance for the sake of provocation. It may have wit and humour but Nanatopia also makes good of its inspiration.
For an emphasis on roasted warmth, turn your nose to Corpse Reviver from FZOTIC, which melds the sensation of stickiness with an image of sugar in its many forms: caramel, melting dark chocolate, salty liquorice, dried fruits, vanilla, amaro and whisky oozing on the surface of a glass. It’s a generous after-dinner cocktail, garnished with a scorched sprig of rosemary and orange zest. With a measure of plush and animalic civet in the base, it is exactly how gourmands should be – at the edge of the inedible. Sugar Addict from BTSO similarly works with sugary material, elegant with its touches of milky musks, cashmere woods, and sweet smoke. Vanilla beans roll around in sugar to create a speckle of black on white, warmed underneath with the blunt and blushing heat of cinnamon.
1969 by Histoires de Parfum begins as a medley of summer fruits - especially a blushing, syrupy, and sun-ripened peach - embraced with roasted coffee, lashing of vanilla, and tempting dark chocolate, with clove as counterpoint. At its heart, this is a floral fragrance dominated with rose and supported by patchouli, a classic pairing that welcomes great variation. Altogether 1969 is a juxtaposition: fruit and earth, fresh yet spicy, clean yet dirty. Magnificent.
Finally, warm yourself with a seriously tempting chilli-spiked Spanish dark drinking chocolate in Boccanera (Orto Parisi). A simple idea executed in a manner only possible in Alessandro Guiltieri’s hands – Boccanera is hauntingly dark; a bold composition supported by powerful sandalwood notes that leaves a long lasting impression. Boccanera is without relief, that is, without contrasting freshness – and is a steady wall of smell, blending wood notes with delicious ones.
