Start with the primordial - though there are a few options. With Zoologist’s Olm, once believed to be a baby dragon, you have the aromatic portrait of this cave-dwelling aquatic creature. The scent of limestone, tangy-salty mineral formations, and cold jagged cave stones, Olm is ozonic and earthy, oily and smooth, with an iodine sheen set against wooly cashmeran musk and velvety Iso E Super. It is at once dank yet intriguing. Tyrannosaurus Rex (Zoologist) needs little introduction, and this fragrance is less about the creature than its environment and the K-Pg extinction event. One imagines an ancient era where the flora and fauna of the earth are unrecognisable - with huge deadly flowers and big beasts - all of this set ablaze as a searing asteroid crashes into the earth. T-Rex is resultantly no apologies - a bold and elaborate smoky theme, scorched and charred, while droplets of metallic rose oxide offer a chilling premonition of blood-lust.
The fuzzy and stout Hyrax (Zoologist), with its little fangs and pack behaviour, is a mammal that produces hyraceum - a waste product that accumulates over generations, hardening, harvested, and then tinctured. It is deeply pungent in aroma, animalic, phenolic, and warm. A touch brings depth to a composition, though Hyrax is not shy - and is at first a booming animalic cocktail with a heart of rose, saffron, and whisky. Its unapologetic opening is something to be experienced, rewarding in the drydown. Bull’s Blood (Imaginary Authors) approaches the bestial in a different manner - crafting a brutal rose as if trampled on by hooves. Not for the faint of heart but for the full of heart, it unsettles with a metallic, bloody opening - it is intense and thickened with a ‘black musk’ accord that is animalic, tobacco-laden, and earthy. Bull’s Blood is asymmetrical and gripping, adrenaline-filled and addictive.
Inexcusable Evil (Toskovat’) is hair raising and puts one on edge. The sensation of shock and provocation is not new to the world of art, or perfumery for that matter. And oftentimes the force of shock is what is required to get the message across. This extrait de memoire is violent - out from the bottle with the piercing charge of iodine: an impersonal smell that creates a sterile mood. Inexcusable Evil is unafraid of lingering in this state of discomfort. Iodine’s peculiar affinity for the chemical burn and tarnish of gunpowder is emphasised here, robbing the scent of any chance of sweetness or reprieve, mingling with blood, wound dressing, ozonic notes.
And perhaps the most (in)famous provocation: Secretions Magnifiques by Etat Libre d’Orange. High pitched aldehydes, algae, and milk notes - sharp and mixing in tension, grips and assaults with instant association: blood, sweat, sperm saliva … confusion and subversion. A work of conceptual perfumery designed to speak to all the senses at once. Here Secretions Magnifiques asks: what do we accept as clean and sacred, and what do we reject as dirty and profane? This is the manifest power of fragrance - it excites, disgusts, and can subvert the norm. This is Etat Libre d'Orange at their worst, which is indeed their best.
