The opening smells like my fingers after I've been eating cheese Doritos, like cheese powder, onion powder and msg. There's iris underneath somewhere. This is very, very strange. It's interesting but it doesn't smell like perfume. Basically smell your fingers after having bar snacks, herby bread etc, this is that. It's definitely accomplished, but not wearable for me.
So Neandertal have two new Perfumes Us & Them, a sample of which they very kindly sent to me prior to the release (Thanks Brooke and Kentaro) however I still hadn't tried anything at all from the brand at that point, and I didn't really know what to expect. If I'm honest I'd been a little put off by the usual suspects and the seeming saturation of Youtube reviews when something new arrives on the scene. No matter, These are truly artistic from composition to brand concept and marketing, I don't want to be suckered in but I am, Neandertal is just cool. None moreso than 'them'. It's perfect. I couldn't ask for more. A beautiful, resplendent, mildly sweet, smooth, fleshy, leather perfume. I've recently taken up leather craft and this reminds me the most of veg tan, natural tooling leather, thick, glorious smelling and a blank canvas of possibility. This is like the best musk perfumes, minimal but little jewels poking out from a silky, mist of loveliness. In this case it's a sort of Iris/orris feel I suppose but unlike any other you've smelled before. The closest for me is Aedes de venustas Iris Nazarena, but in truth they are as different as they are similar. Them has fresh, vibrant top notes, which keep putting in an appearance after you'd think they'd be long gone. Then a sweetness, that orris theme punctuated by complementary carrot seed which I'm not surprised to see in the notes, such a fine use in here. Then you have a mild sea spray, but not salty or aquatic just a breathy, animal suggestion of ambergris. It reminds me of a trendy Scandinavian furniture store where everything is posh, arty, minimal, low slung cubist, buttery leather sofas and the air smells of wood and leather. Guys this is a leather perfume, we can break down the individual aspects and call it orris and carrot and citrus and whatever but its a fiercely modern minimal pebble of a contruction that conveys leather much more realistically and effectively that a hit of IBQ, saffraliene, birch tar or castoreum. This is clever, clever, clever, by a brilliant perfumer that my pal from Edinburgh told me about ages ago....I should've paid more attention to her. So Euan McCall is something of a revelation to me at this point,his other efforts for the brand are great too but THEM just transcends perfume into a special territory of had to have, adoration for me. Beautiful perfume and comes in a frosted, icicle of a flacon, pure art!
“THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” What perfume were they wearing? Kurt Vonnegut Jr. never really got into that in his satirical dystopian science-fiction short story “Harrison Bergeron,” but I suspect it was Them, by Neandertal, a fragrance distilled to its most minimal, stripped-down DNA. A radical exercise in simplicity, a deliberate erasure of complexity. It’s very essence, a complete and total absence. A void, a vacuum, a nothingness. Olfactory egalitarianism in a bottle, where no note dominates, not a single note is even discernable. Wear it not to make a statement, but to embrace the scent of unadorned equilibrium—a radical olfactory utopia where no note rises above the others, and every aromatic expression is rendered equally silent.