Floyd

It doesn't really want to get light anymore. Everything has looked sepia-brown for days, just like in the old photographs that pass before my eyes. Felice is watching over me at the bedpost. Her scent of heavy champaca blossoms will probably gradually numb me. Dora brought me daffodils. They wilt like dust in horse stables, as if they want to crawl out of their vase, over khaki-colored resin light beams, the obscure sweetness of my skin into the earth in my pillows. Oh if only all the notes were there too. Yellowed and dark like the tobacco wallpaper peeling from the leather walls, no longer sticking to the tar beneath. They should peel down into the cellar, over the damp moss on the clammy walls, but slowly decay into dark earth with my manuscripts.
**
According to Teone Reinthal, she only uses plant-based ingredients for her fragrances, which are therefore subject to seasonal and local fluctuations; harvest conditions, degree of freshness and the type of distillation can also lead to different results, making each batch unique.
She created the first version of "Kafka" solely for herself in 2012, later using the base accord for "Tantra" before reformulating it years later to create the Absolu de Parfum we now have: "[...] a beautifully powdery, floral leather chypre", as she describes it herself.
However, I don't find it powdery at any time. Rather, the champaca blossoms seem heavy and narcotic to me at the beginning, the daffodils wilted, slightly indolic, almost horse stable-like in the initially very dominant, tart, resinous, earthy labdanum, which is mixed with slightly cinnamon-sweet, smoky nuances from the styrax. Dark sepia tones dominate the picture from the start, which slowly transforms through spicy tobacco leaf notes and smoky birch tar into the floral leather that defines the heart, before the base of gently cellar-mod earthy Sumatra patchouli, supported by moist, earthy moss, shapes the character for several hours until the drydown

(With thanks to JeanMarc)

Can't see their hands in front of their eyes. Are alone in the dark. Somewhere out there. There is only the rustling of the wide meadows as we leave the woods. The sound of our footsteps in the harsh grasses, the swirling leaves on the wild herbs, the bitter scent of night-cool clay, the crackling of the clammy thousand-rooted trees, their moisture in the leather soles, long since worn and worn out. Come on, let's go further. In the distance there is aromatic hay in the fields and honeydew on the sleeping flowers. Morning is already lurking on the horizon.
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Kamila Aubre from Heist-ob-den-Berg in Belgium is a photographer, aromatherapist and independent perfumer. She produces all her vegan, 100% natural fragrances sustainably and in very small or limited editions.
"Dark Meadow" actually combines a wide range of scents that we associate with meadows, as if the scent molecules were swirling over nocturnal grasslands that you roam through. The spicy-tart, earthy-herbaceous-bitter notes of angelica root are present right from the start and are first combined with herbaceous-fresh, slightly woody lavender. Ginger brightens things up a little. Soon there is the scent of foliage and freshly cut grass (violet leaf) on slightly musty, earthy patchouli, in which floral, leathery nuances also shimmer. In the very complex yet transparent fragrance, spicy hay aromas (coumarin) and delicate drops of honeydew (labdanum) on delicate herbal flowers (camomile) are increasingly perceptible towards the end. The path through the meadows at night, which lasts several hours, is rather quiet overall.

He was lying on his back and raving about lizards. Of alien lizards. The friendly kind from exoplanets in distant galactic outskirts. They had come all the way to us in search of vanilla ice cream, found Earth and what grew from it and started dancing with joy. All of this was captured in his amulet.
It glowed like a lemon candy on a fiber of basil. He put it on me. Its dirty filling of tobacco shavings and woody balsam poured onto the cognac-soaked prunes of my still confused thoughts. They soon sprouted chocolate blossoms with fruits in leaves of flowery silks on thin green herbaceous threads down into mulchy barks. Wrapped in a cloth of velvety sandalwood, vanilla tobacco leaves were found there, which disappeared after a few hours in spicy mists in the universe.
**
Eric from House of Heartistry runs his one-man indie artisan label exclusively via Instagram, where you can get in touch with him directly if you want to purchase one of his creations, all of which are released in small editions.
"Lizard Mojo" is a collaboration with the Bristol-based artist Psychrome, who designed the cover illustration, originally for the gaming platform Overlord.xyz, which is probably where the somewhat confused story about the fragrance comes from, that it depicts friendly alien lizards that visited Earth in search of vanilla ice cream and started dancing with joy at the scents they discovered.
Indeed, one enters the amulet (Mojo) via an accord of citrus with a tart hint of basil, overlaid with dirty, balsamic-tobacco, woody-dry amber, before notes of dried fruit and dried plum in cognac (Davana) emerge underneath. A rather fruity-herbaceous jasmine with a white chocolatey effect - I'm guessing iris here - forms the bridge to more floral notes (tulip tree), which are gradually replaced in the base by velvety sandalwood notes, vanilla tobacco (amber) and earthy-mulchy oud.
Although the concentration of the mixed-media fragrance is relatively high at 29%, the lizard amulet projects moderate to skin-deep and also rather average in length, in which it skillfully maintains the balance between green-herbal-citrusy, floral-sweet-dry-fruity and an ambergris-oud-sandal accord.

Would you like to come with me to the woods? I still have half an herb candy, we could share it. You can trust me. There are lots of fir trees there, they needle like in the rain after Christmas. You don't need to be afraid. There are rose geraniums that entwine themselves in them, which is why there are sharp mists wafting like the silver clouds from the hair around my cold eyes. Do you want a moss coat like me, the same one our grandfathers wore? Go on and it will grow on you. Can you see the dark, soapy tracks like soft furrows in the earthy soil between the dry, damp trunks? In their long brown shadows, musk tracks still creep, invisible but intertwined with the ghosts of times past.
**
Californian self-taught perfumer Manuel Cross has only been creating fragrances for his own Rogue label since 2017. Anyone who has smelled a few of his perfumes will be able to blindly recognize his very own DNA, as it is mostly heavy, earthy, rather vintage-oriented mosses that carry his fragrances in combination with balsamic notes, as in "Targhee Forest", which is dedicated to the national forest of the same name in the northwest of the USA.
You enter this forest through a rugged, cool mist of ethereal green desert mugwort, damp conifer needles and sharp, slightly hairspray-like rose geranium. In combination with nuances of fir balsam, one can soon think of an herbal candy, albeit one of the spicier variety, before Cross's typical oakmoss, heavy, earthy, discreetly soapy and, in combination with the musk, slightly animalic, dominates the bright aromas. A retro moss, as we know it from the fragrances of our fathers and grandfathers. Patchouly contributes its part to the damp, earthy overall character, cedar adds a dark, woody tinge, the fir balsam is a yellowed, resinous film through which you look at this forest, which projects its images clearly to moderately and for an above-average length of time on my skin. A wonderful journey back in time.

Full moonlight shines on shadowy faces. Eucalyptic shadows flit from the Otherworld on ethereal strings of pungent herbs like sage leaves in the nettles. A flickering hiss. Bengal flames in the tops of the lonely Joshua tree somewhere in the cold of the deserts at night. Bright voices in the green mists, fading slowly in the mint dust of the earth, in books yellowed by tobacco and pale as vanilla. I must have found a grimoire between moss-covered walls.
**
Abby Hinsman makes her herbal fragrances by hand. She either grows most of the materials herself or harvests them from her two and a half hectare forest in Vermont. Both her fragrances and her delivery times vary accordingly, as she only produces very small batches.
"Grimoire" (a spell book with magical knowledge) reminds me strongly of Abby's "Joshua Tree" with its blend of sage, herbs, resins and minty patchouli. Right from the start, light green, spicy, herbaceous, pungent sage dominates. However, eucalyptus and camphor make it seem even more ethereal here, before citrusy elemi resins and minty-earthy patchouly gradually shift the impression towards moss at the heart, a moss that initially drifts in a resinous mist, which gradually softens the sharpness with soft brownish tobacco notes and delicate vanilla aromas, but without completely losing the ethereal-green overtones. The magic works moderately over several hours.

(With thanks to Marieposa)