Smell of the coming winter: 7 best scents with sandalwood
Text: Ksenia Golovanova, author of the telegram channel Nose Republic
We continue to select the popular "autumn" notes. and look for them in the most non-standard compositions. This time, under the hot hand of our perfumery critic Ksenia Golovanova, sandalwood fell - we used to associate it with the "riddles of the East", but in fact this woody component has many aromatic appearances. Show the seven best.
Escentric 04
Escentric Molecules
8350 rub.
for 30 ml
The perfumer Geza Sean wanted to make a fresh, savory sandalwood scent and, for the fourth series of Escentric Molecules, chose the appropriate substance: first of all, Javanol smells like sandalwood, but also metal, grapefruit and roses. In my opinion, Escentric 04 is the best and certainly the most unusual thing that the brand had, a real "molecular kitchen". Sean managed to remove all the East from sandalwood with its hair-like princesses and carved chests filled with gold brocade - a sandalwood hologram, highlighted with radioactive citrus, turned out.
Concrete
Comme des garçons
12 000 rub.
for 80 ml
Recently Vica made an excellent text about how everyday and everyday recognizable gradually penetrates into perfumery. The author, in particular, cites the example of "concrete" Concrete, Comme des Garçons, gathered around sandalwood - a material that until recently was associated with exotic and Maharajas, and now successfully pretends to be a common building material.
Emma Grace Bailey, from the predictive trend of WGSN, explains this: "The modern world is gloomy, confusing and rushing towards global catastrophe at all - there are no trustworthy rainbow names, they seem fake, far from reality and real life." Well, if your daily reality - spiced tea with milk, brewed on the roof of a skyscraper, Concrete, in the words of Vice, will seem to you everyday.
Moonmilk
Stora skuggan
€120
for 30 ml
We have already written briefly about the "Moon milk" of the Swedish brand Stora Skuggan, but we will tell you more. The story of Moonmilk is this: in 1545, the naturalist Konrad Gesner makes the ascent of Mount Pilatus in the Swiss Alps and spends the night in one of its caves, and ten years later describes his experience in a vast treatise - the first in the history of mountaineering. "At night, the moonlight illuminates the cave so brightly that it seems to take the form of fog," Gesner writes. "It gathers under the ceiling and is surrounded by stalactites that drop white tears in puddles between the stones - they never dry out. Moon milk."
What the scientist so poetically describes is nothing more than a solution of calcium salts (translated from Greek stalaktos is “dripping drop by drop”), but to the sandal - the basis of Moonmilk - Swedish perfumer Thomas Hempel clearly came from milk: indeed, essential oil Sandalwood and its synthetic analogues have a characteristic wood and creamy aroma. The sandalwood in Moonmilk is well cooled by lily of the valley and cardamom - after all the night in the mountains - and has an interesting salty-mineral shade like that of Borjomi. Strange, beautiful.
Dries van noten
Frederic malle
9900 rub.
For 30 ml
Of all the fragrances of the brand Dries Van Noten, probably the most underrated. To one, he seems to be unlike the classic "small" (strange, quiet, not to say polished), to the other - not related to the image, style or reality in which the designer Dries van Nothen lives. Indeed, there is neither bold color combinations, nor firm overlay of patterns and prints, or orientals translated into the perfumery language in the composition.
According to the Fragrantika classification, Dries Van Noten is an oriental woody fragrance, but in fact it is a very unusual gourmet: perfumer Bruno Jovanovic unscrews the natural sweetness and milky shades of sandalwood to a maximum, turning it into dough, and using smoked gvayak and sulfurol, substances with "fried" smell, provides the cake with an appetizing crust. Not so much Dries van Noten as a still life of Clara Peters, but - fine.
Sandalwood temple
Sana jardin
£180
for 50 ml
Here is another sandal that has taken root in the territory of gourmet fragrances. Sana Jardin is a new brand that positions itself as the first socially responsible perfume brand in the world; It was founded by Amy Christiansen Si-Ahmed, a past trustee of the Cherie Blair Foundation, which helps women in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. What Si-Ahmed does: in fact, gives a permanent job to rose pickers, jasmine and orange blossom in Morocco, from where most of the fragrant raw material for the brand’s compositions comes. Typically, the collection of flowers lasts several weeks a year, and the rest of the time female workers are interrupted by odd jobs. But, receiving, according to the contract with Sana Jardin, secondary products of distillation and extraction (floral water and wax), they are engaged in the production of their own cosmetics for a year and retain all the profits from its sales.
The fragrances of Sana Jardin are not only conscientious, but also beautifully made - by Malev Eau de Magnolia and Music for a While Carlos Benaim. Sandalwood Temple may not be the brightest fragrance of the collection, filled with the honeyed light of non-Berium Blonde and the ylang Revolution de la Fleur, but the most meditative: to inhale its vanilla-sandalwood, frivolous sweetness you want endlessly - like running your hand into a box of milky biscuits.
Orb_ital
Nomenclature
9900 rub.
for 100 ml
Synthetic compound Iso E Super, around which Orb_ital fragrance is built (in Takasago, a major Japanese manufacturer of fragrances and perfume compositions, this substance is called orbiton, hence the name of the fragrance), it smells exceptionally pleasant and transparent - with pencil shavings and drying wooden shelf with old books. In Orb_ital his cart, and the so-called hindinol, which has a wood-creamy, slightly floral smell of sandalwood, is a cart. In combination with each other, they produce an interesting, somewhat surreal effect - a Magritte tree floating in the air.
Amsterdam
Gallivant
£65
for 30 ml
The British brand Gallivant ("Flaner") devotes aromas to cities and, in some cases, to districts - for example, there is an excellent Brooklyn in the collection. The idea is old, but working: perfumery and travels are precisely baked in one, the sweetest and fragrant shop of universal cuisine. Amsterdam, as conceived by the creator of Gallivant Nick Steward, fixes that strange and disturbing for a Russian person, but pleasant and exciting for a European moment, when autumn smoothly flows into winter.
The Dutch concept "gezellig", close to the Danish "Hyugge" (warmth, comfort, comfort), which the perfumery Georgia Navarre reproduced with the help of milk sandal and various shades of pepper, became key for the mudboard. It turned out a warm urban flavor in the spirit of Poivre Piquant, L'Artisan Parfumeur, but less edible.
PHOTO: Escentric, Comme des Garçons, Stora Skuggan, Frederic Malle, Sana Jardin, Nomenclature, Gallivant