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Bright, strong, green citrus. Herbal green lavender, delicate white flowers. Woody and almostly lactonic sandalwood rounding everything.
The musk in the beginning is not dark, but definitely a skin like quality, almost lactonic. Like a baby.
I'm actually surprised how much I like it this time. I tried it first a few months ago and it was just okay. But today is the first day we had snow, and the vibe is just right and so I pulled this one out of the drawer (I have a small decant) and sprayed it three times. The longevity is quite spectacular, and the smell is wonderfully rich. I miiiiight be getting what the hype is about. I'll probably never buy a full bottle, though, it's ridiculously expensive.
The opening has a flash of bergamot giving a green citrus edge to a powerful rose and oud. What the synthetic jungle essence is, I don't know, but I find the oud to be quite chemical and rubbery. Maybe it's my skin, maybe it's the other notes mingling. It's been around 30 minutes and the rubbery smell is fading. I will update later into the dry down.
4 hours in - any harshness has gone and I now have a sweet, woody, aromatic rose oud. A little dankness there, maybe just the oud, could be the patchouli.
Rusak's site describes this scent as a “minimalist weirdo. A creature of deception. Perfume nerdery” and while I don’t actually know anything about this perfumer, I will say that this nondescription captured my imagination and which evolved into a little crush. The sort of obsession that you develop on someone you glimpsed on the subway reading a dog-eared copy of a book by your favorite author, in this case, let’s say creepy Japanese manga artist Junji Ito, and then you had a series of unsettling dreams about them, so you wrote an ode to this stranger in the local alternative paper’s missed connections section. And like Japan’s most successful and lauded horror author, Rusak has injected an extraordinarily potent amount of weirdness into this scent. Beginning with a mundane peek into the spice cabinet, you are subjected to a surreal descent into madness featuring fenugreek’s uncanny curried maple syrup-ness, a dry, itchy tingle of salty musk, an enigmatic spike of aniseed, and an oily conflagration of black pepper. I can’t make heads or tails of this scent, and as a matter of fact, I like to imagine it as a many-headed, rattle-tailed beast, much like its very name. It’s truly one of the most eccentric and singular fragrances I have ever sniffed and I stand in admiration of its sublime strangeness.
A bastion of old Hollywood and notorious celebrity hideaway, this olfactory ode to the Chateau Marmont mentions wilting roses, crisp linens, and vintage wood furniture and I do think all of that comes across. It’s an incredibly languid scent, like Lana del Rey in front of her vanity singing in a sleepy, drunken drawl into her mirror about how her moon is in Leo and her Cancer is sun, which if you ask me is a very weird way to phrase that thought. There’s dreamy indolence to this scent, moments frozen in time, captured in a Polaroid picture, dust motes floating forever above a lone rose in a chipped vase just beyond the mirror’s cloudy reflection, never settling on the bloom. A powdery musk of memory of a night that never really ended, a faded photograph that belongs to no one anymore, wrapped in tattered linen and quietly slipped under a shabby fringe of carpet in a shadowed corner of an old bungalow.
A cosy lactonic chai that envelops and comforts
