Buds Desperate to Be Pried the Fuck Open (ROUND 3)
scent of the day: Vetiver Nocturne Absolu, by Bortnikoff
This belongs right there with Sir Winston and Symphoni de Neroli given its tartness and ambergris glow—especially with Symphonie de Neroli. I might call this the big brother of Symphonie. Both share so much. They have many of the same flowers: a soapy-metallic neroli, which gives an impression of bleached porcelain bathtub rubbed down with lemon and a bar of lye, and tannic-skatole jasmine sambac, which smells like teenbopper pudendum after a teabag has been sitting on it to sooth a tear (the coal-tar shampoo for her psoriasis pulsing into the air a naphthalene smell common to mothballs and railroad-tie creosote). They share the two same varieties of vetiver: mineralic-mud Indian vetiver (rhu khus), which smells like going into a stone cellar in the dead of monsoon season to dig up a jar of copper coins, and asphalt-mothball Java vetiver, which smells like peaty soil that a week back had bacon grease dumped on it (an aroma that, in conjunction with the jasmine sambac, really ramps up that napthalene smell). They even have a common base rooted in sea-salt ambergris, inky-lichen oakmoss, and musty-tobacco trat oud.
Because of how the terpenic-herbal champaca leaf, which on its own resembles kaffir lime leaves, interacts with the neroli, which itself locks onto the lawn-clipping aspects of the dirty peppery tufts of vetiver, Vetiver Nocturne Absolu gives me a lemongrass like in Rogue’s Chypre Siam. That lemongrass aspect, however, is more tart in Vetiver Nocturne and that is because of a green apple note that, with the rhus khus, brings this into the same family as Ensar’s Qi Nan. Tartness, yes, is powerful and with literally trigger your saliva glands.
Vetiver Nocturne Absolu is an opulent twist on vetiver. Many will not read this scent as vetiver not only because it predominantly features Rhu Khus (Indian vetiver) but also given that white flowers and vanilla and spice (cinnamon cardamom) bring it in a wildly different direction than Sultan Vetiver or Vetiver Insolent or Sycomore or Encre Noire or so on. I really love the emphasis on Rhu Khus. It smells so expoticv and I cannot get enough. Veridian Buzz, a stemmy-herbal wheatgrass Ensar, has this sort of swampy vetiver too—with all the green-apple tartness and stringency it naturally brings. Many Ensars have this Rhu Khus and apple vibe, this vibe of hyper-acidic green apple cut with a copper knife on cold monsioon mud. Layers of Jade and Qi Nan are some others that bring that vetiver and apple vibe. Layers of Jade is a strong connection, in fact. The whole thing slides into a lovely green vetiver scent, herbaceous and rooty, like in Vetiver Nocture Absolu—even down to the green-apple vetiver vibe and the background dusty leather animalics. Vetiver Nocturne Absolu is just more nutty and fungal, fresh and sparkling, whereas Layers of Jade is more fruity and funky and dense, blackurrant and castoreum giving it an extra feline-piss leather quality.
I get a strange semi-sweet-meets-minty-ashy oud in Vetiver Nocturne. Experience with Ensar has allowed me to see how oudy this base is whereas before, associating oud merely with barn, I overlooked it. Apple jasmine tea vibes that is soft and round in dry down—the soft and round a combo of the furry-dusty oud and the creamy milky sandalwood. honeyed mentholated green apple from oud and jasmine and vetiver. jasmine here has pissy aspect.
As for the green apple aspect (which is really prominent), it is not Promise’s synthetic apple. This is more more real and exotic here, which is hard to do with apple. The briney-pickly quality of Africa Olifant I get here slightly too—which is a plus. Like in that Nishane I get a diaper peed aroma here too slightly.
Champaca infused sandalwood oil gives a bit of Chinese incense mall store that sells Buddhas and incense cones, but you have to search for it under the grassy tartness. This fragrance combines creamy and tart and luminous and salty and dusty—a lovely feat. vetiver is dirty and rooty but—because of the other ingredients (especially the champaca leaf and white florals)—it comes of more like dirty grass than roots—dirty grass that has been dumped with the pulp of juices Granny Smith apples, which gives a sort fo green-rose facert at times. The roots do come out much more prominently in the drydown.
This boils down to a typical Bortnikoff ambergris scent: sun sparkling on the water ambergris—a great DNA. The ambergris is beautiful and wonderful to have, but it is quite common across Bortnikoff’s oeuvre. You might say that this takes the ambergris base (think Sir Winston) and infuses it with this element: stewed pulp of dirty-sweet grass. Sex and the Sea saltiness in 8 hour drydown of Vetiver Nocturne shows how prominent the ambergris is. Those who wanted a stereotypical vetiver scent would have been better served with no Indian vetiver and much less ambergris. But then we would be in familiar territory. Who wants that at this point? Is the Nocturne and allusion to Chopin?
*Let's workshop this poem about how, as Alexa’s lullabies drip venom, childhood’s half-life keeps getting halved—a negative that, for some of those lip-lickers out there, might actually be a mega win!
*reworked each stanza
Buds Desperate to Be Pried the Fuck Open
The bad part of our anal-Perc beat-it-up monomania— refrains, chanted by music icons
on each screen, kinking souls like rape—might be the good: kickstarting kiddo libidos
to a rev rate that no ban on titty-blooming pussy-juicing Bisphenol A could ever curb.
*Spank me, slap me, choke me, bite me. . . . / Give a fuck bout what your wifey's sayin. . . . / I just want to fuck all night.”—Doja Cat
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
