I meant to write my first post like a year ago. Oops! Well today is finally the day because I simply could not help but share some words by a person in the perfume community whose writing I admire so very much, our very own @odedeparfum. He has such a way with words and is one of the rare reviewers out there who, when the review is over, I want more. He doesn't just review, he entertains and is just so smart in his delivery of his opinions. As an artist, it's such an honor when your works brings out passion in others or inspires them to reflect, engage, even argue. It's the conversation that I love so much. Then to have your work critiqued by someone so thoughtful, well-spoken, it's such a pleasure. Here, I am posting his review as well as his photos. I simply couldn't let it disappear into the depths of the Instagram feed. "I nearly went with @houseofgrayfragrance Labaya today, but that Tabac Blond-tinged gourmand is dulce de-licious, and I didn’t need another temptation during my sweet-tooth sabbatical for Lent. Besides, Bohemia’s a rich, woodland pastoriental that’s a much better fit for when you’re hungry to gird yourself against the slings and nightmarrows of modernity, and since I do Elizabeth Taylor doing Bette Davis saying “What a dump!” whenever I look at the news, I’m famished for what Bohemia’s serving.
Bohemia has an unfiltered quality to it, like it’s proto-perfumery, and it smells of fresh split pine, saps, floral (rose, apple blossom) and fauna (civet)—detectable but unseen, damp earth on your fingers, and the resins whose spiritual gravity have caused people to forage for them for millenia. It’s getting lost amidst thousands of trees and realizing—late at night, under the stars obscured by the leaves—that you’re already home. The @auphorie brothers, Eugene and Emrys Au, are the perfumers, and their work is obviously exemplary, but it’s @aveparfum’s Elizabeth Rose, the founder and creative director of House of Gray, who deserves special praise. She’s revised familiar classical styles (Labeya: tobacco oriental; Paradisus: make-up floral; Bohemia: chypre) with autobiographical panache, though it’s Bohemia’s bucolic capacity to offer urbanite respite I most admire. See, there’s a certain subset of chypres that feel like you’ve indulged in some kind of incantatory, pre-urban paganism. Their headiness is forest fresh, dark, and dense—the way light barely breaks through ancient, tight-grown groves—and they have a way of making you feel like you’re a witch, which is Puritanical for “a woman with an opinion.” They exist amongst anti-contemporary comforts and transportative pleasure, and Bohemia—while *technically* a woody oriental—hones in on this sweet spot to pluck a thicketed expanse from a microcosm. It’s magic, you might say, but that’s just my opinion."
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