The problem with “Colours”, pt. 1
The tricky thing about creating scents for our core collection is that they have to work in a diffuser and on skin. When diffused in space, you smell the total impression of a scent all at once. When worn on skin, the scent evaporates layer by layer. It’s the latter that holds the most surprises, as the DNA of the fragrance unspools and mutates with warmth and time.
A Jovian scent feels “finished” when it feels cohesive, evocative, but still a tiny bit unbalanced. Often, “fine French perfume” tries to polish its materials like tumbled gemstones. That’s fine if precision is the only goal. But natural materials have raw edges that I think are worth preserving; they contain internal rhythms which vibrate inside those who smell them, inciting a kind of sympathetic resonance.
I started working on Colours to recapture a particular scent memory: eating a tart, oversized Seville orange while surrounded by flowering orange trees. When an orange tree flowers, the aroma sails pungently through the air, vivid even from fifty feet away. It’s warm, velvety, and slightly oily, like an alien orchard photosynthesizing its own gasoline. Smelling the blossoms changes your perception of the fruit; more than a refreshing juice ball, an orange is a flower that dreamt itself into liquidity.
The orange blossoms in question surrounded the Praça Al-Mutamid in Silves, Portugal. It’s a sort of modernist public garden built to memorialize Mu'tamid ibn Abbad, the last ruler of a kingdom that covered parts of southern Spain and Portugal from 1023-1091 AD. Ascending to power at age 13, he became known as a defiant head of state and an accomplished romantic poet, appointing his once-banished gay lover as Governor before personally hacking the man’s son to death. The idea for Colours began somewhere between my quick wikipedia dive into the queer boy poet king of Seville and the smell download I was getting that blurred the boundaries of fruit vs flower.
Colours doesn’t really smell like proper orange blossom. I wanted to try to bottle the tumultuous, electric citrus/floral intersection that the place and its history conjured. In order to give it the quality of something hallucinated out of time (easy, right?), I used a CO2 extraction of angelica, among a few other green and spicy things. Angelica oil is a bitter green tonic that feels freshly oozed from a subterranean cave garden. When you diffuse Colours in a space, the angelica works as intended; a textural edge for the flowers and fruit. But in development, I discovered that when Colours is applied to skin, it becomes a two act narrative. First you smell the sunlit orange garden, then all the green sparkle and spice arrives as an LSD flashback.
The time-based nature of perfume has to do with the weight of the raw materials, and angelica is much heavier than most things in the composition. I mean this literally: ingredients in a perfume evaporate at different speeds based on how heavy their molecules are. A light molecule is a “top” note and a heavy molecule is a “base” note. Long after the immediate fantasy of Colours fades, angelica will hum its vegetal buzz on the skin.
Maybe it’s not great business sense to admit this, but I’ve always been conflicted about this two-act narrative. I’ve worried that the ending smells too hot and simple, like frayed wire. You’ve probably never smelled something like it, which I like. But it dominates the last act of the scent on skin, which seems unfair to its original inspiration.
The solution I’ve come up with is to add an extra ingredient to the next batch of Colours roll-ons and perfumes. They’ll include a tiny amount of a rare and (extremely) expensive absolute of porcini mushroom. Produced in France, porcini absolute is deep, savoury, and surprisingly plush. You could clock it as mushroom if somebody told you that’s what it was, but on first sniff it’s more like strong black tea with honey and damp chocolate umami topsoil. Its molasses-thick texture is perfect for playing bass to angelica’s psychedelic twang. I’m hoping that it can throw some softening candlelight on the drydown, sculpting the story from beginning to end.
As the formula evolves, the astrological indications for Colours are also being subtly revised. There’ll be more on that process, and the collaboration behind it, soon.