No surprises – we begin with Etat Libre d'Orange, who continues to wave the avant-garde flag, representing one of the most creative, transgressive, and imaginative fragrance houses. In Jasmin et Cigarette, pure white jasmine is contrasted against warm tobacco. Sacred jasmine and profane ‘cigarette’, the fragrance explores the namesake floral ingredient, as its fruity and lactonic qualities are picked up by apricot, while its slightly shadowy underside – indoles – has a pungency shared with tobacco, rubbed with an ingenious hay note, lending warmth and texture. Andy Tauer’s Incense Rose similarly works on the principle of juxtaposition, light and dark, as brilliant extracts of rose shoot into the atmosphere thanks to effervescent orange citrus fruits and cardamon. This midnight background is the work of patchouli, incense, and castoreum, which lend a classical feel to an otherwise boundary pushing work.
Penguin from Zoologist is a fantasy of ice and salt, notes that bear no smell yet appear on our noses unmistakably. It imagines a glacial Arctic blast, its opening a chilling gust that one can feel as much as they can smell. Its texture is fuzzy, shivering, sweet and spicy, and primarily lead with the pine-like and aromatic snap of juniper berry and the mellow fruity sharpness of pink peppercorn. These are berries frozen in ice, whilst touches of saffron double this effect, its metallic sheen vaguely covering its smooth warmth sans flame. In the end, Penguin is an impressive chypre - typical but also unusual, turning to ice as opposed to earth.
Contrast this with Tauer's Lonestar Memories, a gritty, smoky ‘cowboy’ campfire leather that calls to mind vintage leather jackets and well-loved denim. The key here is contrast, surging the intense leather note with lashings of clary sage, geranium, myrrh, and jasmine. It takes a brilliant artist to look at a composition laterally, to see its affinities and patterns, and Tauer has done just that with this fragrance. Equally, LiTA from Bogue demonstrates that smoke fragrances can be intensely creative - smokiness becomes an umbrella category that encompasses the burnt, charred, roasted, boozy-peaty, and the caramelised - inclusive of all of their subtleties and differences - and LiTA maintains these many impressions. You can enter into the thickest parts of LiTA and never feel encumbered, and this is its charm but also the source of its marvelousness.
To conclude – an eschatological fantasy - La Fin du Monde (Etat Libre d'Orange) imagines the "the end of the world" and for Etat Libre d'Orange the end of the world smells like buttered popcorn, gunpowder and pencil shavings. Boom!
