1969 by Histoires de Parfums

(Fragrantica, LuckyScent, Histoires de Parfums)

1969 by Histoires de Parfums is like a drive through Topanga Canyon. There are wind chimes in the air and a sacred waterfall surrounded by quartz crystals and a shrine stuck with hundreds of prayers, confessions, well wishes. I hold my Tiger’s Eye-carved rabbit in my hand. The ocean disappears amongst thickets of trees, grasses, hints of the desert, the brush of sage and hummingbirds on the winding canyon road. I can see the quiet canyon now, the glimpses of camper vans and the scent of patchouli.

You find a peach from the goblin market. You are brought into a world of enchantment and earthy eros. You taste raw cacao for the first time and nearby is the burn of cloves. This is the land of endless summer, the land where ocean becomes canyon becomes desert becomes mountain. “Indian Summer” by The Doors plays quietly on the car radio. I love you the best / Better than all the rest… You lay with your lover amongst the grasses, there is the babble of the creek, the shade of the ancient tree. It’s just like the photograph, “A naked couple embraces as a river rushes around them while at Woodstock” (1969). This is a sort of paradise.

The Summer of Love never ended, it’s just hidden; in the canyons, valleys, the desert air, in the howl of the coyote, the circling of the hawk, in the divinity of angel numbers, the all-knowing horoscope, in the pouring rain making rivers in the desert stillness. This is the vision of 1969 by Histoires de Parfums, an Edenic refuge for the wild at heart, the eternal flower child. My bit of earthly heaven.

Juliette Sandoval is an artist from Los Angeles. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Orpheus, a literary and arts magazine. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Bruiser, Apocalypse Confidential, JUNK, and GROTTO, among others. You can find out more about her work here.

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« Poetic Mind »
(Notes on Aromatherapy)

As I walked into my psychologist's waiting room for the first time, I found myself in a small space with a single chair and a wooden screen beside it; rustic. Classical music played while I thought about what I’d say in that day’s session. I noticed a perfume diffuser next to the radio called « Poetic Mind », from a fast fashion brand. The room was filled with a light and refreshing scent.

Weeks later, I had booked a Pilates class. I entered a huge room filled with mats and balls, everything so beige and the shapes so round that even the yoga mats had rounded corners. I noticed the exact same perfume diffuser as the one in my psychologist’s waiting room, « Poetic Mind ». Even in the bathroom, the soaps were from the same collection.

Is this the smell of wellness?

I looked up which fragrances were blended in it, and it turned out to be bergamot, almond blossom, and white wood — offering a kind of powdery, fresh, and light scent. Bergamot (less sweet than orange and less acidic than lemon) is fruity and sunlit, known for its calming and relaxing properties.

It took me back to when I was a child, when my mother bought an essential oil diffuser and would make different blends depending on the time of year. In winter she would do a blend with mandarin, orange and cinnamon, sometimes adding thyme and verbena to purify the air. In spring it was mostly a blend of geranium and lemon; in summer, a mix of mint, lemon and orange fragrances. She also told me sometimes she would add ylang-ylang.

I’ve never had a diffuser of my own until recently, when I decided I wanted to test different essential oil blends to feel grounded and calm my anxiety. I asked my mom and friends, did some research online, and tried out various blends. (The number of drops you use in a diffuser depends on the size of the room and how strong or subtle you want the scent to be, I put 5-15 drops depending on the essential oil I’m using.)

Here is what I’ve come up with so far, a vast blend of anxiety-reducing, mood-balancing, mind-soothing, clarity-giving, and nervous system-regulating fragrances:

• Ylang-ylang and sandalwood: Think: warm skin, silk sheets, candlelight.

• Lavender, sweet orange, and ylang-ylang: Sweet, soft, sensual.

• Bergamot, geranium and lavender: Balanced and harmonizing, smooth, powdery.

• Lavender and petitgrain: Fresh but not sharp, floral but not overly sweet, slightly citrusy, with herbal depth. I feel like it is great for unwinding without getting sleepy.

• Eucalyptus and bergamot: Bright and airy, clean and refreshing.

Colline Fournier Montgieux is an artist and writer living in Bruxelles.

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Welcome back to Journal Olfactif, Health Gossip’s olfactory arm. Today, artist + writer Claudia Azalde offers an ode to her grandmother’s signature scent — named after the Persian Gardens of Shalimar.

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Shalimar by Guerlain

(Fragrantica, Guerlain)

A string of blue-toned saltwater pearls are being pulverized by the hooves of a miniature golden pony trotting along the lip of a giant clam shell. A beautiful song that hasn’t been heard for fifty years emerges from a lucite music box; a serenade played by a bevy of marzipan harps. They enter a perfectly made-up mouth and slide right down the cavity of her swan neck. The chamber is warm, with a cream-colored love seat covered in pin-tucked sateen cushions the color of champagne and teddy bears. A glass orb hangs suspended in the middle of the room on a gold chain, the bottom of it covered with the silkiest mink you’ve ever seen. It is a scent with an aura of established poise. Something to wear if you are all dressed up and you know what you want.

My grandmother’s perfume collection was an object of intense fascination for me; as a child, I would stare at her perfume bottles for what felt like hours. She had two blown glass bottles on her sink, one baby pink and one baby blue, with tall stems and tasseled atomizer bulbs. On a display shelf were rows of tiny decorative bottles from all of the big players — Guerlain, Chanel, Yves St Laurent, Kenzo. There were Jean Paul Gaultier bottles shaped like women, a vintage Avon bottle shaped like a head of lettuce, the classic Lou Lou by Cacharel in its opaque plastic sky blue and deep red bottle. I don’t think I was very impressed by the way they smelled but rather the objects themselves, relics of 80s decadence. When my grandmother fell ill and the house began to get cleared out, all of the perfume was given to me. (Unfortunately, some of their aura might have been lost in this change of ownership.) I can still picture them on the shelf in the large pastel pink bathroom, standing on my tippy toes to catch a glimpse.

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Foin Fraîchement Coupé

(Fragrantica, Oriza L. Legrand, LuckyScent)

Picking wildflowers beside glittering, effervescent waters, siphoning the sweetness from red clover petals with your tongue while wearing a Matsuda straw hat & Cacharel liberty print dress. Foin Fraîchement Coupé (‘freshly cut hay’) by Oriza L. Legrand is one of the most unexpected gifts from the treasured French house, and I gravitate toward it even more as I await the first blooming snowdrops of spring. A soft herbaceous chorus of ivy, soapwort, sage, and shimmering frost-covered hay bales are met with an energetic juxtaposition — bitter angelica, wild mint, and star anise — nipping at your heels like a rambunctious wolfhound puppy in a bucolic oil painted scene.

When I think of this fragrance as a spring scent, I imagine the earliest days of spring — the star anise and mint paint a particular crispness in the air. It’s cold without being overly melancholic or aloof; in fact, it’s quite joyous. The silage is introverted, inviting those closest to you in with moderate longevity. This mystical bouquet of solitude is as natural as crushing freshly picked herbs and flowers onto your own skin or rolling down a grassy knoll.

As a hay note lover, this wouldn’t be my first choice if I wanted to smell like a warm, Andrew Wyeth sun-soaked day —but that’s exactly why I love it. It is by no means a dry, dusty hay bale like Serge Lutens’ Chergui; this is green, verdant, freshly baled hay. This fragrance is timeless, almost vampiric, the way it transmutes itself into endless imagined women in my mind. She could be a Belle Époque woman, coquettish in the most classical sense, arriving at a dinner party with a small pink canary hiding beneath her crinoline cage skirt. Or even the blonde girl in Picnic At Hanging Rock with her Botticelli angel-esque beauty, who mysteriously vanishes inside a volcanic formation on Valentine’s Day. It’s a rare fragrance where the inner mystery isn’t dark and brooding, but pastel, hazy, and light — like an early Sarah Moon editorial. It’s the moment you realize that freshly picked clover will soon wilt away, or the feeling of studying your own pond reflection as the clouds above you close in like lush curtains.

If it were an aria it would be: “Tristan und Isolde” by Richard Wagner.

If it were a stone it would be: pale green chalcedony.

Perfect for every dreamer (or anyone tired of department store synthetic warfare).

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Jenna Horoky is an artist and jeweler living in Chicago. She’s been on the newsletter before — read her feature here.

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* Images, in order of appearance: David Hamilton, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Sarah Moon.

Miller Harris L’Air de Rien

(Fragrantica, Miller Harris)

Keep smiling, it takes 10 years off!

When I Googled ‘Jane Birkin now’ as a teen, I was disappointed to learn she had retreated into motherhood and wrinkles, dressed down like an old philosophy professor. I imagined she smelled like loose tobacco, cavities, and stale books. A couple of years later, I watched an interview with old Jane. She was humble, with a fine-wine wisdom. She waved her hand when asked about her distinct gamine beauty; it’s fun for a while then it flees and leaves behind wrinkles…and that’s when life begins.

Mid-life Jane had an unfolding wisdom, warm and graceful. She had become a delightful orator of love and beauty. In another interview she recounted the release of Je t’aime moi non plus, leaning in and grinning at the memory of the song being denounced by the Vatican. And suddenly it became clear that she was to remain a girl forever. Her sensual swag was there, her inner world was deep, but she remained playful and mischievous about it all.

Miller Harris’ L’Air de Rien was made for a Jane in 2006 when she turned sixty years old. She carried the fragrance with her until her death, though I hear the first release smelled like ‘dirty underwear and cat’s ass.’ I was gifted the fragrance (after it had undergone a few changes) by a friend who didn’t like it on himself because it was too strange. The cap smelled like oak moss and patchouli which I initially dismissed. One day, I serendipitously sprayed it on my neck while wearing a maxi skirt and no underwear. I was on my way to the Topanga Canyon farmer’s market; it turned out to be the perfect combo.

The fragrance starts as a playfully odd blend of both vegetal and powdery notes, like sunscreen on top of oily skin. The neroli, orange blossom, patchouli combo does have a very freaky hippy touch, like Jane’s Portuguese fisherman’s basket. And then it all settles into something quite magical, the ‘forever girl’ smell: vanilla.

This vanilla is for a sensitive soul who finds great eloquence in aging. It is tender and maintains a quiet resilience that lasts all day. It’s a cute and sweet vanilla, that makes men drool, but the deep musk and amber add some intelligence and maturity, like the wrinkles that come after years of crooked-toothed smiles. Some people say it smells more like lignin than vanilla. For me, it’s like sex in the library, warm saltwater breeze between your legs… girlish, filthy, adorable — skanky, even.

‘It-girl’-ness is a kind of l’air de rien, ‘an air of nothing’, an effortless ineffable charm that sticks around even when youth fades. Jane’s special strain of that charm is captured in this naughty fragrance. On the right person, it’s that forever girl swag that can’t be faked.

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Riska Seval is a writer and model living in New York. She occasionally publishes on Substack.

En Passant by Frederic Malle

(Fragrantica, Frederic Malle)

Pure lilacs, just harvested. Broken green stems still wet. It’s mid-May, my mother’s birthday, and I carry an armful home, leaving them in a full bath to drink deeply. It’s hard to believe something so elusive could be captured in a bottle, yet French perfumer Olivia Giacobetti has done it with En Passant for Frederic Malle with just four notes: lilac, cucumber, white musk, and cedar (invisible for me). When I first encountered it, I smelled the tension between the fleeting nature of lilacs and the strong desire to grasp onto them. It reminds me of the moment when your senses come back to life after long days of hibernation.

I received En Passant as a gift for my birthday in 2020, during the lonely Covid summer. A hopeless romantic with an idealized vision of relationships, I kept it for someone I hadn’t met yet, someone special, for whom I would create delightful, intimate moments. I imagined wearing it for someone with exquisite taste, someone who would appreciate its simplicity and subtlety, someone with a keen nose touching my lilac ears, сollarbone and wrists. That was when I first read a review that said a woman who wears this fragrance always seems to be a bit of a fairy. I wanted to be a fairy, too. But I rarely wore it, only opening the bottle to inhale lilacs during dark winter days. Over time, the scent became fuller, like a lilac bush in bloom before a late spring thunderstorm: sweet, heady, almost overwhelming. What once seemed light and transparent became rich and dense. I started to feel that the bottle itself was holding back my unfulfilled feelings and desires. Keeping it so precious felt both special and dangerous, like wanting to stare at lilacs forever. So, I began wearing it randomly.

Now, I prefer it on warm winter and early spring days, when the air is fresh and cool after the rain. The musk note keeps the fragrance from being too lush, adding a slight dustiness; a texture to ground its airiness. I once thought En Passant belonged to silk and light dresses, but I prefer it with heavier fabrics. It pairs well with dark clothing, contrasting the crystalline ephemerality of the scent. Lately, I’ve been wearing it with my black mohair turtleneck. Covering my nose, I let the scent perform a sacred dance around my neck, in the hidden space between skin and wool, tickling and whispering; giving me solace. It lingers better on paper and fabric. On skin, it fades quickly but then suddenly reappears, and for a few seconds, I remember what it feels like to be in love. Not with someone. Not even with life itself. Just in being in it.

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Sofia is a fashion researcher and writer living in London (she was also this year’s first guest). Read the March edition of her year-long newsletter, Constellation of the Body, here.

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Città di Kyoto Santa Maria Novella

(Fragrantica, Santa Maria Novella, Lucky Scent)

I turned the corner from Sutton Place onto 57th Street when she caught my eye. Drifting against the muddy snow, she wore a dark-brown mink coat longer than she was. The ends dragged against the sidewalk, sweeping up bits of ice and salt as she strolled like a broom. A matching mink headband adorned her skull, held in place by a scarlet ribbon tucked neatly beneath her bun. From her left shoulder hung a silk peach-colored scarf, draped diagonally across her petite body to the back of her right knee. I picked up the pace in order to observe it in better detail: embroidered white lilies, irises, and violets climbing up the small of her back, so finely articulated the flowers appeared to be covered in a light dusting of golden pollen.

I was closing in on her now, click, click went her heels, scrape, scrape went the mink. I was nearly breathing down her neck and I could smell the oily, musky scent of the fur, stored carefully in a cypress closet, as well as iris, jasmine, orange blossom, peach, and rose — effused from years of lighting incense and drying flowers in her pre-war apartment. Her smell made me dizzy as I inhaled it again, slower this time, a cloud of hypnotizing, slightly animalic powder sheathing her from the gnarly, cloying city surrounds.

Lemon-scented wood polish, a small pillow stuffed with lavender, the woods after it rains but somehow, dry, like the cedar sauna at the Russian baths when a guest brings in essential oils. She brought a gyoza dumpling into the sauna once, the pork fat and ponzu sauce dripping down her chin as she bit.

Santa Maria Novella launched Città di Kyoto in 2005 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Florence, Italy’s inauguration as a twin city to Kyoto, Japan. The perfume draws an unlikely parallel between two 2,000-year-old cities, both former imperial centers of trade, politics, art, and culture in their respective corners of the world. Hinoki and lotus flower meet a florentine iris and medieval herbal notes in a combination that is woody, peppery, and warm like coals. The marriage of two iconoclasts of the east and west makes this perfume a perfect choice to wear out in a New York winter. Last weekend, I had spaghetti Friday night and soba Saturday night. There isn’t a fragrance that would make more sense in a city like this.

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Emilie Engel is an American writer. She is currently reading The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing and updates her blog semi-regularly.

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Synthetic Jungle by Anne Flipo

(Fragrantica, ScentSplit, Frederic Malle)

A practice I’ve implemented as often as possible involves sitting in front of a mirror and spraying the air in front of my face, on the back of my hand, and on a piece of paper placed on the desk in front of me. I then write a list of words, memories, and images. It’s a meditation on scent as image and has been a pretty great catalyst for painting. The most frightening scents usually render the richest scenes. Now that the dead of winter has settled, I wanted to challenge my usual inclination towards coffee, chocolate and patchouli — so how about that spicy vegetal scent I encountered at Neiman Marcus last month?

French master perfumer Anne Flipo’s infamous Synthetic Jungle (now renamed the more forgettable “Synthetic Nature”) tells sweet lies of spring in frost. A forever lasting, nostril-chilling disco chypre of funeral flowers, sharp greens and oakmoss embodying the fearless spirit of those sexy aldehydic piss and potpourri scents of the 80’s. A crack of galbanum and a bouquet of indistinguishable green herbs, a big juicy green pepper and rubber are the star notes here. Then comes Lily of the Valley, that familiar cold floral associated with both fertility and death, the promise of life in winter, and the scent mellows — for a moment, palatably feminine. My instinct is to hang onto the familiar note of grass but before I’m placed on a lawn or field, I’m hit with the latex and all conceived notions of nature and its comforts distort to this bit of inorganic earth Think of a fake plant but only the soul of one. She wants to be held in your hands; she wants to be real. The abject latex-clad woman on the Roxy Music albums come to mind, but there’s something keeping me from holding her: she hisses. A glossy eye through iron thickets? A vegetable garden painted by Soutine?

Synthetic Jungle would be worn by Petra Von Kant or Poison Ivy but also your cool grandmother to whom you don’t give enough credit (see: Ralf Schwieger’s Lipstick Rose for the domesticated version of SJ). The misunderstood androgynous sister of L’Ombre Dans l’eau with the spirit of a wet lizard. One of the most challenging scents I own. At times giving me strength, at times making me ill. (The best things do, I suppose.)

Our power to project on and twist the natural into something hyper-human, infused with memory and object until it becomes uncanny again is the essence of all art — and Synthetic Jungle delivers. Pairs well with CK One during daytime. After midnight, wear it raw.

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Shannon Ryan is a multidisciplinary visual artist and fragrance enthusiast from Philadelphia.

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Tuberose Tantra by Kismet Olfactive

(Fragrantica, Olfactif, Kismet Olfactive)

The knife sinks into a fresh, green bulb of fennel — anisic, flowering, and delicate. Lace-like tendrils drape over our hands and slip through our fingers like loose strands as we braid our lover’s hair. Like any experience or living being, context invites shapeshifting.

This tuberose takes root in a terroir of surrealist sensuality. We cross into its world via an ephemeral bridge to the pearl-tinted and bewitching vespertine blooms of Brugmansia arborea, a nocturnal relative of deadly nightshade. Its equilibrium of dewy and powdery is balanced like a pendulum on a gothic spire. The opening is reminiscent of a sultry flower market with buckets of long-stemmy blooms — syringa and cinnamic aldehydes, damascones, and solar salicylates billow through the doors like smoke escaping a hotboxed car.

The floral expression unfurls and oscillates between narcotic tuberose and opulent jasmine like a call and response between Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. Notes of green bananas ripen on the countertop next to a brown paper bag filled with russet-tinted Bosc pears. A drunk bee wanders around the tuberose pistil like a carousel, caking its legs with malted pollen that dissolves on the tongue like rain on warm clay. A soft coo of vanilla crystalizes into the balsamic texture of resins. A soupçon of Peru balsam casts an incense-y and medicated allure — a watercolor-like diffusion into the cresolic shadows of ylang-ylang. I sink my teeth into the flesh of cherries, spitting the pits into a ceramic bowl, wondering whose lips will touch the next generation of fruit and how many degrees of separation lie between us. A musk impregnated with blackberries projects a cocooning resonance, an immortal lullaby perpetually reverberating off canyon walls.

We pass a shop with hemp sacks of dried ginseng. A Thai incense candle is lit, infusing the botanical smoke into a fresh batch of fatty coconut milk. The skin of ginger root is peeled slowly and deliberately, with the back of a spoon, revealing its flesh. A cold-brew tea of licorice root and wintergreen is poured over ice, coating the body's interior with its slightly spiced sweetness — a perfect counterbalance to the warmth of creamy sandalwood, toasted clove and fiery cinnamon leaves. It’s here where the ethereal nature of the fragrance anchors itself to the corporeal.

The dry down of this perfume lives up to its tantric namesake. We linger at the precipice of climax, suspended in a state of perpetual arousal. This fragrance is erotic — Venus is serving Minne di Sant'agata on a silver tray, evoking the sensation of Tita’s rose petal quail in Como Agua Para Chocolate (1992). It’s soft, voluptuous and feminine, yet veiled in deep, knowing waters — hello, Lilith. Tuberose Tantra is long lasting and becomes more profound as time progresses, a true magic trick by composer Shabnam Tavakol.

I wear this fragrance post-coconut milk bath, after oiling my skin and braiding my hair. A cup of ceremonial cacao warms my hands, my favorite nightgown drapes against my body. I may take a night walk. I may ask myself to step into myself in ways I never have before. You may find me wandering around with a sticker on my aura reading “Keep Honking! I'm listening to Alice Coltrane's meteoric sensation ‘Universal Consciousness!’” because indeed, I am.

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Madeleine O’Sullivan Stearns (Moss) is an olfactory artist and student perfumer at the Grasse Institute of Perfumery. Her approach to scent is interdisciplinary, drawing on a deep interest in winemaking and terroir.

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Rita Hayworth in MISS SADIE THOMPSON (1953)

Love Bomb Perdrisât

(Fragrantica, Perdrisat)

Raspberry, sugar, rose: Love Bomb is an invitation to suffer sweetness. After the rose open fades — pretty, and a touch powdery — it turns to a rich, cloying raspberry, steeped in notes of burnt sugar, almost candied and crystalline. It’s not the fresh, fructose ripeness of a summer raspberry, almost squished into a jammy blur at the slightest touch, but something faintly medicinal — descriptive of the fruit rather than a realistic account of it, drawing out tart stickiness. Out of the strong floral and fruit notes comes forth sweetness. Between burnt caramel and fairy floss, a slight depth and heat.

Perdrisât’s Callum Rory Mitchell has a knack for both tongue-in-cheek naming and dizzying spins on fruit fragrances. Take Fuck Boy, a musky, pineapple heavy scent that allegedly features top notes of cocaine, or Sycophant, a coldblooded green fig that turns soft and milky. Love Bomb is aptly named. Powerful, syrupy, alternately delicious and difficult, toying with overweening emotions, a cloud of spun sugar dissolving in a storm of tears. It begs comparison with another explosive floral: Viktor and Rolf’s Flowerbomb, that all-too-literal grenade shaped bottle filled with rosy fruit syrup. But where vanilla softens any threat that sweetness may carry, Love Bomb is unrelenting and self assured, projecting with grandeur and conviction. The summer of love is here, with added sugars and existential cavities, mumbling sweet nothings through rotten teeth.

Careless, hot nights, pink drinks. Raspberry lemonade, red cordial, red lollipops, red 40. Consider your blood sugar levels. The sweetness of medicines. White chocolate. Blue-eyed soul. The “Sweetest Girl.” Rita Hayworth as Miss Sadie Thompson: a redhead in pink dresses and red skirts, falling in love with a marine. She’ll hit this island like a bomb!

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Loqui Paatsch is a writer and student of art history, with a focus on Australian abstraction, post-object art, and alternative histories. She lives in Melbourne/Naarm, where it is currently summer’s peak.

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Surface Tension by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, 1992

CELINE La Peau Nue

Skin remembers before the mind does. The ghost of a touch lingers longer than the words accompanying it. Dissolving into time, a whisper against the ribs. She stands at the edge of memory, breath shallow, waiting for the air to move. The scent of bare skin, warmed and worn, is both then and now. It carries a name and lingers, like a fingerprint pressed into the fabric of the unseen.

She first noticed it in the hollow space between strangers. A man on the metro, his wrist brushing hers too briefly to be intentional. A woman in a café, tilting her head back, the scent of skin rising like heat from pavement after rain. It followed her home, not as perfume, but as something native; something woven into the body’s remembering.

Nights were the worst. The sheets smelled of powder, the air thick with a presence she could neither touch nor escape. Skin against linen, against shadow, against the idea of someone who had not yet arrived. The scent seeped through time, through rooms she had once occupied, hands she had never held. She felt as though she were being traced, not by sight but by memory, by the imprint of touch, slipping from her mind but never from her skin.

And so time bends in the presence of longing. A moment stretches, fluid, the inhale of anticipation before a fingertip moves. The body speaks before mouth does, skin understanding the truth before words can form. She walks through the city, the heat wrapping around her like an echo. The scent of herself, bare, unguarded, follows. Someone turns, someone inhales. Recognition without recollection. A familiarity lingers, like dust swirling in tender light.

Naked skin on linen, on warmth, on breath. It is not perfume but a suggestion, an invitation of knowing without seeing. Of being known without asking. She closes her eyes and feels it move through moments. A fragrance without edges. The smell of bare skin.

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Barbara Suim is a new writer from Amsterdam working between literary analysis, poetry and prose. She primarily conducts research on memory in rural literature; how narratives preserve and interpret the past. In addition to her academic work, she undertakes private research and publishes annotated bibliographies on www.enscitatis.com.

Dahlia by Cy Twombly

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Welcome to JOURNAL OLFACTIF, a new space for fragrance writing and discovery. Today, multidisciplinary artist & fragrance enthusiast Nika Kocharov reviews Naomi Goodsir Nuit de Bakélite — an unexpected take on tuberose by French perfumer Isabelle Doyen. Challenging and long-lasting, NEZ ranked this scent as one of “111 pieces to smell before you die.”

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Tuberose, galbanum, violet and tomato leaf in a turbulent dance — a true green scream!

Chopped up bell pepper on a slab of palo santo sheathed in raw leather; the bitterness from gnawing on a big waxy leaf numbs my mouth. I discovered this scent in interest of the house, Iris Cendré being a top reach of mine, but it wasn’t until browsing my sample collection that I had rekindled with this complete oddity of a perfume. More recently, I was impulsed with swatching the sample on my wrist during a flight when an infant grew sick in the row ahead. A scent so intoxicatingly green became the perfect antidote, masking any and all unwanted olfactory. Nose steady on pulse for 15-20 minutes, entranced in relief, I’d found a way to ground myself amidst the chaos. (Perhaps a worthwhile tactic for warming up to a new but challenging scent!) I’ve been equally mystified and charged up about this fragrance since.

Deep resins, fields of fleurs immortelles met with a bewitching murmuration of white florals casts a vibrant green spell. Notes of carrot seed, tomato leaf and angelica flower, a must for those who gleam in the sweet savoriness of summer vegetable gardens, or in need of a chartreuse kick in the chin during winter’s harsh months. Uniquely artisanal in classic N.G. fashion, Nuit de Bakélite isn’t by any means an everyday tuberose; it is meant to challenge and captivate — to enchant. Its intensity and silage is spellbinding, green by all means, image of a medieval grimoire taken over by the lush surrounding grove (note: Grimoire by Anatole Lebreton).

The flaxen-haired sculptress in all black linen Eskander and bakelite bangles wears this perfume. Her sharp brow peaks over large square acetate frames, she wears a somewhat maniacal yet innocent expression forged by years of travel and past-life wisdom: the premise of a narcotic lady.

A powerful, but grounded fragrance for a wearer in likeness — one who basks in their own shadow.

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Nika Kocharov lives in New York City. For more fragrance content, check out her blog.

The ‘Rebellious Heiress’ Nancy Cunard

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