Tuberose Tantra by Kismet Olfactive

"Like any experience or living being, context invites shapeshifting."

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.