So Brave (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Synesthesia, by mesOUD
This is a medicinal fragrance—not the Egg Shen Chinese apothecary of Prin but much more (like, say, Meo Fusciuni’s odor 93) in the medieval alchemist of Merlin. One gets impressions of a Merlin figure operating amid the incense of a stone basement dampened by the European swamp. The greenness here, plus the glut of animalics, invite—perhaps more so that TSVGA’s Fiona—medieval-Shrek associations: sweaty leather, animal-marked conifers, and herbal tinctures (the European bay leaf rather than the asian Thai basil or pandan.
Mentholic green with an ashy-oud drydown that works well with the medicinal tobacco vibe. There is a cool glut of animalics here. Like in Fiona, though, they blend well into a fuzzy pelt of a swamp critter (castoreum, muskrat, deer musk) with quite a history. The civet is a bit recessive. The electric scream it offers, which is loud in my favorite civet scents of all time (Pinoy Sirun’s Blue civet blue dream and Elkhaldi’s Civet Regale), is here but—despite being amplified, one could say, by the sulphur lightning of skunk and the sour-wine of the rose, is in the background (like it typically is in classic french perfumery). The saltiness of ambergris, woven into the velvety invitation of spiced-chocolate deer musk, is here: salt crust on a rusted ship hull.
There is an old-world feel of resin spread over wood here. The woodiness is both dry and damp—this a result from pencil-shaving cedar mixed with a variety of ouds (strong in their tobacco medicinality) and a sandalwood that gives the impression of warm milk in a wooden bowl. The resinousness is both stone-like and chewy—this a result of the mineralic olibanum and the plum-jam-forgotten-on-a-leather-belt labdanum and the pharmacy-honey of propolis and the bitter-fungal myrrh.
We have bigtime greenery and in different senses, from the brighter green of opening to the darker green of drydown. I feel all of the green, despite its facets, is rooted in a pineness that is a function of (1) olibanum (which gives a bright pine smell with a metal edge reingforced by the bay leaf and the pine-needle-in-gin juniper), (2) real tinctured baltic amber fossil (which gives a scorched pine resin aroma with hints of asphalt baking under sun), and (3) cedar moss (which lends, especially with the help of soapy-lemon Melissa, a coniferous cleaning fluid impression).
The Iron Duke tobacco style is here, as it is in 2 AM. This seems like a kitchen sink fragrance. But that is the intent. I always get perplexed when people call Prin kichen sink. After being deep in the artisinal land we see Prin is an excellent perfumer. He straddles artisanal with niche so well. If his ingredients were better it would be an absolute wrap.
I need much mmore time with this. This is only first wear.
*Let’s workshop this poem about how aesthetics constrain the evolution of moral sensibility (which is why yesterday's Klansman would marry a black girl over a Botox trout mutant of today's Hollywood).
So Brave
Morals have aesthetic criteria: although we now welcome actors with Down syndrome
(some of us, teary after just one beer, rising from the love seat to clap and serve friends
a few choked-up pieties), we still draw the line—comedy aside—at excessive droolers.
“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)
