I got the impression that you have been following roughoutline a bit. Do you think you can recommend a perfume based on that?
Yes!Start with perfumes with vetiver
Eau de Celeri by Monsillage. 2014 Art & Olfaction artisan perfume winner and to my mind a good conceptual fit, EdC is the attempt to replicate the smell of celery without using celery. Its vetiver is smooth, green, the drydown is soft. The opening is the thing: “green-dirty” not in the “broken stems, bruised leaves” and “some feces” sort of way but in a very photo-realistic “root vegetable pulled out of the earth with crumbly dirt still clinging to it.” I’m indifferent to the perfume qua perfume as a whole but I think it does some very interesting things.
Encre Noire by Lalique. Definitely try this. It’s green and poised, voluminous. This perfume is on top of its shit, and a little unsettling. If this perfume were a supernatural presence, it would be the Ghost of Future Audits, maybe. It’s looming in a way that makes some people very uncomfortable– I like it a lot but I once daubed some on the back of my partner’s neck and he spent a day oscillating from “distracted” to “nuts” trying to figure out what was haunting him.
Or,
A holographic modern floral like Madame by Jean Paul Gaultier. Not recommending this because it’s a good smell but because it made such an impression on me. A resentful rose blossom astrally projects but can’t quite get on the proper channel to communicate its frustration. Opens with a piercing synthetic smell in a high register. This goes on for a while (too long). An hour later you’re relieved to find something sweet and close to the body.
Korrigan by Lubin is a sweet woody fragrance that the LuckyScent sales assistant pitched as being very much like plastic, in a way. This is not vinyl (try CdG or Demeter, I guess, I haven’t explored it well enough) but a sweet boiled sweet that I specifically associate with the semi-soft and slightly powdered plastic that mid-market dolls were made out of in the 90s. NB: Korrigan is hella expensive so try this out as a sample size first.
As a counterbalance to objects without humans, humans without animals. This is also the site where some of the niche perfumers source castoreum (beaver glands) for tinctures. If you get the opportunity to smell, do it: it’s a complex, sensual smell that I might best describe as “the darkened diorama wing of a regional natural history museum built midcentury.” If you’ve ever been to the Tilden Wildlife Natural Museum, it smells like that: wood, fur, darkness, dust.
Check out roughoutlines, it’s a good tumblr.
Thank you so much. This gives plenty of food for thought and (hopefully) experimentation. On a different -- but related -- note: Do you think fragrance should be approached differently according to gender?
And if this expertise has impressed you as much as me vistit Maundrette’s Tumblr.
