Amor Prohibido (ROUND 2)
scent of the day: Funkberry, by Ensar Oud
Only my second wear—so what I say should be taken with grain of salt (and is nowhere near the rigor I give to my button-up fragrance reviews).
Finkberry is easy to underestimate because, after a surprising first few seconds of dazzling tartness (yuzu, terpenic olibanum, grapefruit oil, etc), it settles for about fifteen minutes into something that feels like Guerlain’s margarita-mix Habit Rouge meets Kerosene’s bergamot-tea Unknown Pleasures—only here in Funkberry, but still disappointing to people who expect too much from the work “funk” in the name, we get a civet-blackcurrant cat pissiness a fruit kambucha swirled with caramel and, from the civet and blackcurrant (which the suggestion of tart-sour citrus of the opening alive for hours), feline urine. The whole has the muddled garage-band texture we know and love from many artisanal hosues, falling on the more classier side of this spectrum (Pinoy and Prin being at one end, Bortnikoff and Ensar being at the other end, and Areej being in the middle). Perhaps this first phase explains why I have seen so many people jump the gun and sell their bottles off on the facebook groups.
But then, around the forty-minute mark, this son of a b opens up with a musky glow (to my nose now similar to Tibetan musk), a glow tinged with a stunning gassy vibe characteristic of many iris-leathers. like many iris-leathers it seems purple in hue (like the faceplate) but, unlike the buttery richness of Bianchi’s Black Knight, this one is powdery in that throat-tickling way of Bortnikoff’s Classica (which shares its citrus–ambergris–musk–iris–castoreum backbone) and Areej Le Doré’s Cuir de Russie II (which has a very similar combo of iris, violet leaf, blue lotus, jasmine, deer musk). The powder here is amplified by Ensar’s signature ambergris and anchored by a castoreum-labdanum leather, like in the Areej and Bortnikoff, but instead of boosted in tar by birch is colored by both the pissy-caramel of the opening and also by fruit and cheese (a blend of strawberry and raspberry and parmesan-rind Vietnamese oud, which together create what only might call the “adult fruity pebbles accord” common to several Ensars, especially Iris Noir).
While Classica might still be my favorite (its doughy-heliotrope texture gets me every time, so much that some days I wonder if it is my favorite Bortnikoff out of twenty-plus bottles), and while Areej’s solemnity remains the most arresting in its seriousness (as grave as a Germanic crypt, skulls aligned on musty rotten wood, where some powdered woman has been lured), Funk Berry could very well climb with more wears. Of the three, which are much more brothers in spirit and texture than actual smell, I think I can safely say now that Funkberry best embodies Nietzsche’s life affirmation. The most fun and ebullient of the trio, it is the one to wear while reading the “Sanctus Januarius” section of Nietzsche’s Gay Science: Areej’s antique aura brings Russian gravitas (low-vitamin-D melancholy, Schopenhauerian gloom); Bortnikoff’s floral-creosote clash evokes an aristocratic falconer on a sunny day (Cervantine energy); Ensar’s musky fruitiness, meanwhile, channels the equatorial joy of salt-of-the-earth people who dance without hesitation, losing themselves in hip-swirling sexuality unencumbered by Christian guilt—its iris powder very reminiscent of Purple Rain, which I associate tightly with Nietzsche sicne it covers not jsu the Funkberry playful side of Nietzsche but also the brooding and aristocratic. /
Yes, this Ensar dips me right into the southern Europe of Nietzsche’s fantasies: the hot-blooded dance-oriented people of the Mediterranean, where the solemnity of Wagner gives way to the swaying hips of Carmen). The Vietnamese oud here—perfectly chosen for the perfume’s name, given its hints of fermented red fruits and bitter green stems (like the wine-grape stems we get in Corticiatto’s Salute)—brings a clean cheese edge that, mingled with jam and floral facets, makes me think of laughter and movement and song in sunny times of plenty: swarthy tobacco-smoking people eating raspberries, unsugared strawberry jam, viney-urinous blackcurrants, wild-violet honey more floral than sweet, crusty bread, peppered cheeses, wine on the Corsican coast—a fragrance, in effect, that might move the master-perfumer Corticiatto to tears.
And if all that were not drama enough, it dries down to that generic matchstick-ash oud (generic only for artisanal heads of course) that does appear in the beginning to attentive noses (giving the caramel a burnt edge). In this transition down to the muskified oud base the color trajectory shifts too, albeit with some surprising rewinds and fast-forwards, from bright berry red with orange-yellow sparkle to plum, then to brown-red, and finally to slate-gray smoke over the top of that murky kombucha brown-red that could definitely call to mind a berry wine (and, because of a subtle yeasty creamy texture, even the wine lees like with find in Corticciato’s Salute!). I like the blending I am seeing from Ensar. The newest stuff is better in that regard even if the ingredients of the older stuff were better. Some say there are pro perfumers who do the bases and then hand those bases off to be given the final Ensar touches perhaps by that ASMR guy, the one who appears in the videos and who definitely comes off as that neighbor I would let babysit my children with no reservation even after they come home not only with stories about how “He lets us play with his beard!” but with limps and bed-pissing habits.
*Let's workshop this poem--set to Selena’s song “Amor Prohibido”--about a man, presumably older, inviting a girl on a getaway, presumably in a DM--a DM aiming to balance playfulness and predation.
Amor Prohibido
Hey. I think you should let me spoil you a bit. Your semester starts soon, right? So how about we do an Airbnb, a little getaway, before school sinks its claws too deep? I know that’s forward.
But I know what I want. And I know enough about this world, lonely as it is short, to know what you need. I promise to be a gentleman— until, of course, you give me the green light.
“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)
