SCENT OF THE DAY: Musc Gardénia Berke Khan, by Ensar Oud
honey sandalwood floral soap with hints of herbs and mushroom and a mothball tuberose that makes for a strong connection to Meo Fusciuni’s Odor 93, one of my top nich frags. I perhaps do enjoy this more than D’or version—it has more growl. Both have this throat tickling sensation of peach fuzz, the musk doing the work to morph the coconut-mushroom gardenia and the Vicks-labia tuberose into velvet. Orange-blossom plus jasmine does boost the sense of pissy vulva pleats. Here there might be more dust (I would have to wear side by side to see), which also amplifies the vintage vibe. it is so cool how Ensar uses musk and ambergris in his compositions to do what iso e super and ambroxan do for the mainstream perfumers. His compositions have great staying power for being so rooted in naturals. Musky-mildewy gardenia drydown is to die for in berke khan. Whereas d’Or goes more floral and vanillic and sweet (more powdery and more serene), Berke Khan goes more musky and pissy and chocolatey and moldy (more rooty and even more marine, which brings a sense of wet stone basement walls).
*Let's workshop this poem about how institutional pandering and artificial insulation ultimately sabotage black self-determination, competence, and long-term flourishing under the guise of benevolence.
State Intelligence Knows that Spoiling Ruins a People
“Black owned” has not just become the wisest label for a business: every institution
with its eyes locked on the weathercock of Disney pulls out all the stops to hire blacks,
sacred cows (kings, queens) sandboxed from criticism by the velveteen redtape of HR.
“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)
