Bulletproof Vow (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Fiona (batch 6), by TSVGA
Another lumbersexual fragrance—I get that from many of the TSVGA creations. They make me think of Brooklyn hipster gentrifiers poured in from Portland or something. Aside from those negative connotations (sort of what Dr. Squatch wanted to be), this is a top-level perfume, among the best I have put my nose on. You may hate the hipsters—and I do for irrational reasons that I am working on—but you cannot deny their artisanal cheeses and coffees.
Even if the friend in the fragrance community who sent me a sample of this is right, and the creator only got into the game to make a quick buck (instead of for the love), I still would have to give him respect for Fiona—as well as the Pipe series, despite it dipping into the gourmand sweetness I typically steer clear of, and Vicki-Lin, which dips into liquid mesquite smoke territories.
Fiona is the best of the three that I have tried. It has a common buttery antique feel—not the antique wood I love so much in Bortnikoff, especially when it is musty and/or tannic, but something older, something before human history. I think the choya or the seashell elements used throughout various TSVGA fragrances come out loud and proud here in all their umami glory (real umami, not the Megamare ambroxan-calone suggestion of it). This gives me a nostalgia not for my own life but for the sea from which all of us came.
It is not a sea fragrance, but it brings me to the sludge of first life on Earth. I have Areejs that bring me to ceremonial tribalism and even prehuman history, and I have Bortnikoffs that bring me to musty attics, but TSVGA—as I now see through wearing FIONA—brings me to the primordial. Maybe not Pipe as much, but definitely FIONA and Vicki-Lin.
There is that umami aroma that appears in many of the TSVGA fragrances: onycha, choya luban, choya nakh—notes that give briny, animalic seashell vibes, even some caviar. It is a signature as stunning as Tauerade and Bianchi’s orris butter. Onycha, an ancient aromatic ingredient that appears in old texts (one of four elements in the Bible’s description of sacred incense in Exodus 30:34), is the seal of a snail’s shell—the operculum—which gives off a musky smell (sweet, animalic, mushroomy) when burned. I find this nicely represented in Elkhaldi’s Al Bahar.
Fiona is so smooth and buttery, like a rich, well-blended piece, and yet unlike a well-blended piece, this has that garage-band element: you can pick out each note pretty much. That appeals to note nerds. It is a garage-band masterpiece. There is Bortnikoff ambergris and tropicals and even oud, with a heyday Bortnikoff oud feel, like Lao Oud, but the animalics—the amount and type—make this one of one. It is grounding, but in a primeval, prehuman way.
So many of the TSVGA fragrances have a cozy quality, a texture—perhaps because of this womb-like oceanic primordiality, not oceanic in smell but in sea-shell-animalic primitiveness. There is a buttery and comforting naturalism in many of these TSVGA creations. Many go rustic, like Pipe, but in Vicki-Lin and Fiona it is a rusticness that precedes mammals—when mammals were relegated only to the sea.
There is something rustic and old-world like Pipe, but even here in Fiona we get tobacco rusticness, which—because of the seaside ambergris vibes I get too, and the bubblegum—gives me a strong association to Sir Winston. Castoreum here in Fiona is tarry, but here the animalics are not merely dirty or aggressive. They are are ancient, organic, and strangely comforting—like a I get with many Elkhaldi fragrances—biblical.
Batch 6 is more oudy, the animalics are louder, and there is amped-up olibanum—which is usually a good thing in my book—but it overshadows the stunning sandalwood-champaca duo of Batch 5. I also had the misfortune of smelling Batch 5 first (we often prefer what we smell first). I only ever had a decant of Batch 5, and it is now gone. Batch 5, however, was perfectly worthy of the name “Fiona.” Batch 6, which I own a bottle of, might have been called “Shrek”—especially considering that Shrek is himself a gentle giant, a good-hearted guy.
There is, of course, the same spirit in both, but Batch 6 gives us much less foreplay, cutting right to the floor of the fragrance. As such, it comes off less with the lumbersexual vibe—something, again, one would think I like given my disdain for hipsters. But there was something remarkable about the floral version of Batch 5. In both versions there is this lovely jasmine that, with the oud, gives you a very similar PowerBait fishing lure aroma that I get in Miyaz’s Fleur Tabac—an aroma that I thought made the Miyaz utterly unique in my collection until I noticed this.
As the distance grows from the last time I smelled the stunning—flooring—Batch 5, Batch 6 seems so lovely to me. I stand by the idea that Fiona 6 is Shrek if Fiona 5 is Fiona. But honestly, outside of this in-house comparison, Batch 6 deserves the name Fiona too. What a stunning creation here however you slice it.
*Let's workshop this poem about the tragic delusion of a soldier who believes a solemn promise to deliver his fallen comrades' letters can buy him immunity from the indifferent brutality of war.
Bulletproof Vow
Beguiled by belief in a just cosmos that strikes bargains (dried brain on his canteen
less bother than bolster), ecce homo: yet another butchered in battle after having sworn
to deliver—hand deliver, not cock—squadmate letters, if need be, to cobwebbed wives.
“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)
