The Scent of A Wicked Lady – ‘Tobacco Rose’ and Papillon Perfumes

“But he who dares not grasp the thorn

Should never crave the rose.”

Anne Brontë

The Silver Fox is relatively new to Twitter and to be honest part of me is still a little ambiguous about my decision to sign up. I am willing to accept the enormous benefits it has brought to my profile as a blogger and writer and for this I am very grateful; people have been very kind and supportive. I have been able to reach out to perfumers, Houses and boutiques in a way that is virtually impossible with Facebook and posting blogs. I have always written for personal and aesthetic reasons and for the beauty of the perfumed world. I have received some nasty and snide messages in recent months criticizing my emotive style, my lack of negative fragrances reviews (apparently it’s not okay just to be positive…) and most oddly my speed of publication. To all of these I say nothing. My work is my work, read it or don’t.

One of the great joys of Twitter is making friends and the immediacy of getting to know them. It feels exhilarating and charming. There is a sense of community, even if I don’t chat and participate as much as some do, the reassuring flow of news, trivia, shared olfactory expertise and gossip is both cocooning and stimulating. This is how I met Elizabeth (Liz) Moores, the founder and joyous creatrix behind a nascent niche house, Papillon Perfumery, based near the New Forest in southern England. Getting to know her, bouncing thoughts and laughs back and forth has been a demonstration of the benevolence of Twitter and for that alone I am grateful.  

A triptych of ornate and alluring fragrances has been created by Liz, Anubis, Tobacco Rose and Angélique, all housed in classic squared-off bottles and graced with Papillon’s trademark butterfly motif. Launching later this year and already garnering some excellent pre-launch reviews and feedback, the three scents are all eau de parfum strength and feel deeply textured on the skin. I have a feeling they lean more toward extrait in their constructions, such is the billowing amplification of intent on the skin. They already have the ambience and heft of fragrances I have always known somewhere in my history. The notes have resonance and a delightful dexterity in their transmutation of raw materials and delicately rendered aromachemistry.  

Liz had arrived at this sweet aromatic moment after years of hard scented work, trial and error, endless mods, sleepless nights and a sense of perfumed dedication informing her that she was good, damn good. Her background has a ballet story and some remedial massage. Both these elements strike me as vital, using poise, control and carefully applied force where needed to achieve specific effects. Both mediums demand patience and continuous application of technique.

The handling of essential oils in her massage led Liz to broaden and deepen her understanding of aromachemistry and the building blocks of fine fragrance. She completed the Fragrance Foundation CFSS (Certified Fragrance Sales Specialist) course in 2009, submitted to further training then and set about scent making, for friends and family, art & literary projects with one eye continually on a more definitive perfumed future.  

Papillon is artisanal, batch-made juice, the kind I adore, made with passion, anger, sweat and devotion. Chatting to Liz on Twitter, especially about the Tobacco Rose, my favourite of her three fragrances, she was full of humour and gutsy self-criticism about the painful gestation of her rosaceous wonder. It took 147 mods and a lot of creative tantrums for Liz to finally walk away from her testing willful rose, able perhaps to admit she could allow it a sense of freedom, an unfinished edge, a sense of olfactory selvedge. Continuing to chip away at it, honing and obsessing would have left her with nothing except remorse and anger. (And perhaps a battered weary rose…). 

I have a veritable bouquet of rose fragrances in my collection and never tire of sampling new ones. I’ve written before on my aging swoon into this most luxurious and carnal of blooms. The velveteen petals, the weight of symbolism, thorns, love, blood, sexuality, the feel of flesh, death and funereal decoration, the vortex of giddy, compelling scent; all these things roll and crash against each other like aromatic tides. I find rose scents so alluring and thankfully they work beautifully with my skin chemistry. I like my roses on the darker side, the hue of wine, night and papal misconduct. Touches of spice, civet, amber, oppoponax, oud, and chocolate are things I love. But a part of me obsesses over a lipstick accord, the smeared boudoir nostalgia of roses and violet with a dusting of orris and a sparkle of raspberry. So I embrace Voleur des Roses and Drôle de Rose by L’Artisan Parfumeur, Lipstick Rose by Éditions Frédéric Malle, Rose Anonyme by Atelier Cologne, Nahéma by Guerlain, Amber Rose by Shay & Blue, Velvet Rose & Oud and Rosewater & Vanilla by Jo Malone, Isparta by Parfumerie Générale, Rose d’Homme by Rosine, Angel Rose Garden of Stars by Parfums Mugler, Ta’if by Ormonde Jayne, Sa Majesté La Rose by Serge Lutens and Rose Barbare by Guerlain. 

To this esteemed list must now be added Liz’s intoxicating and oddly blasphemous Tobacco Rose, so unlike any of the above and testament to her commitment to and (often difficult) relationship with this most demanding of flowers. I say blasphemous as there is the most delicious sensation of transgression that emanates from the skin, an image of a deeply scented whore, veiled and gaudy, walking the aisle of a catholic church in the quiet aftermath of mass, genuflecting in sunlit traces of resinous smoke. It is a wicked boozy scent in so many ways and I LOVE it. A blend of two different roses, sweet smeared beeswax, oakmoss, ambergris, damp ashen hay and a lovely gourmand patchouli base.

I have been wearing it so much recently, along with Anubis and Angélique, the other two scents in the Papillon collection. Lying in bed the other evening under the influence of yet another round of woozy antibiotics I was drifting in Liz’s rosaceous world and decided Tobacco Rose was the perfume for the wanton Lady Skelton from the very popular 1945 Gainsborough film The Wicked Lady, starring the ravishing and erotic Margaret Lockwood. Indeed her cleavage was deemed so risqué many of her balcony scenes were re-shot for US audiences. Based on the novel The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton by Magdalen King-Hall, the film tells the racy and voluptuous story of a bored and amoral landowner’s wife who revels in the life of a criminal on the open roads as the doxy of a renowned highwayman, played by the silver-tongued James Mason, preferring it to the stifling conformity of marriage, constricting dresses and duty. It is still a shocking film in many ways, she kills, betrays and dies alone, but the excitement and sexuality of her freedom is thrillingly displayed. The image of Lockwood’s beautiful eyes over her mask is a powerful and unforgettable image.

Tobacco Rose is Lady Barbara Skelton, a thrilling ride from conformity; she is an overtly sexual creature, a gameplayer, leathered, dangerous and uncompromising. The dirtiness of the rose is gorgeous, rubbed and daubed, a hot echo of saddle and ridden skin. For me, the blooms are kept beautifully in check by the beeswax/honey; this was a very clever addition. It happens to be one of my favourite notes in perfumery, but can sometimes get lost in the constructions. Here it has been spread through as if with a golden knife, ecclesiastical and sweet. The whiff of hive and wing is rendered with fleeting subtlety beneath the stained glass light of the roses.

The hay and immortelle (Helichrysum) deepen the smoke and leather ambience of Tobacco Rose, reinforcing the late night inn and ridden leather aspect of the scent. Immortelle often has licquorice and burnt dark sugar tones, but here is has echoes of its maquis scrubbiness, dry and gorse-like with a yellow waxen tug beneath the aridity.     

The roses themselves (Centifolia and Damascena), the blooms that drove Liz to olfactory distraction are fused with skill and determination. The blooms are playful, slutty and coy, a delicate balancing act to pull off. The Damascena rose is lustier, more crepuscular, the Centifolia more delicate and reserved. Together they balance and bolster each other’s strengths and weaknesses to produce an ornate, perfumed vintage of heady carmine excess with lovely facets of clove, gasoline and blooded earth. I asked Liz about her use of roses and difficulties she encountered while created Tobacco Rose. A lot of problems stemmed from the use of the rose otto (Rosa Damascena). It is a notoriously volatile material to use. To use Liz’s own fabulous words on rose otto: ‘I love this gal, but she a bitch to work with.’ The measurements have to be perfection; too little and the crushed velveteen texture of the oil is lost amid the sea of other notes, too much and the rose facet edges into mulchy verdigris and dead fridge vegetables. Liz said she had added a small amount of galbanum to suggest greenery, a leaf effect if you like for the flowers to rest on.

So the bitch was tamed (eventually) and Liz got her sexy dirty smeared rose. Easily for boys and girls, Tobacco Rose adapts itself to different skins, deepening, flirting and smoking as and when required. I wore it on a chilled January evening and it smelled like a particular Turkish rose jam I’m rather partial to, tactile and sugared with a shockingly heady bouquet. On a friend it smelled like charred blooms, much more catholic than I imagined. This shape shifting is good scent to me; the perfumer has used notes to anticipate difference and individuality. I love the jammy thing; it stays with me for days as persistent as trashy neon pop.

The other fragrances in Liz’s triptych are just as sumptuous and sexy. I love Angélique; it’s a deceptively simple assembly of cedar, osmanthus, white champaca, mimosa and orris. I am not generally an osmanthus fan; it’s a pretty meh note for me… so I was expecting a pristine softness, woody powder with perhaps a kiss of floral ambiguity. But it is so much more than this. Angélique is the perfumed tale of a pretty, barefaced girl, walking in a spring park. Dressed in white she seems chaste and pure. A sudden downpour reveals her skin, inked with turbulent motifs. Everything is contradiction.

One of the keynotes in Angélique is mimosa, a very French note in my olfactory lexicon; Côte d’Azur roads and sea breezes tugging at the sweet waxen yellow blossoms. I always smell salt and puffs of dust with mimosa; it’s just an automatic association. Liz has blended this most Grace Kelly of blooms with tremendous elegance, marrying it to the soothing tea tones of osmanthus, another note that can sometimes drown under the weight of expectation. Angélique is French for angelica, a member of the fennel family. It imparts a whiff of aniseed to scent and in the drydown of this sophisticated scent, there is definitely a bite of something anisic over the ground of woods and violaceous drift of orris. I had it on the pulse point of my right wrist as I wandered off into dreamland, I imagined Angélique to be sticky and peculiarly hush-hush and smiled….

Anubis was the ancient Egyptian god associated with the funeral rites of mummification and the journeys of the afterlife. His distinctive jackal-headed avatar makes him one of the most easily recognisable of the large panoply of Egyptian deities. Anubis was also present at the ‘Weighing of the Heart’, a ceremony where the heart was weighed against a feather representing truth. If the heart outweighed the feather the soul was destroyed. It’s an intriguing name for a fragrance, but that’s what Liz has named the third scent in her collection.

Anubis is a sueded oriental shrugged jauntily over a supple layer of saffron and jasmine that smells divinely spiced and febrile as it blooms on skin. Liz has used immortelle again, this time for its sombre tobacco-like aroma that mingles so alluringly with the olibanum and bitter cistus lying provocatively in the base. A basmati rice facet rises through the notes and simmers gently into the drydown, warm and sweet and very comforting. It’s an artful and creative composition; streamlined and blended with an eye for effect, drama and beauty. Each of the notes has its place yet they lock into one another and move smoothly, blurring themselves into a perfect perfume rhythm. I have smelt a number of niche scents recently where the notes, beautiful as they are, seem to be spinning in air, unable to connect to other elements in the formulae. The simplicity hurts. 

What I love about this particular scent is that it’s not a slavish Egyptian style oriental per se but homage to the idea of Egypt. It’s a little like the huge mania that gripped the world for all things Egyptian after the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb by Howard Carter in 1922. Fragrances, jewellery, fashions, movies and literature were all influenced by the obsession for Egyptology, mingled with the then art style of Art Deco. Everybody wanted an echo of the Old Kingdoms, the style, golden and monumental, the mummies, the treasures, pyramids and strange gods. But on Western, sanitised terms, safe and gorgeous, far removed from the reality of canopic jars and brutal slavery.   

Anubis is an Egyptian dream scent, a fantasy of influences and scented outcomes. I have moved away from orientals in the last five years or so, I just can’t take a chance with the severity of my migraine attacks. I used to adore them and drowned in their effulgence. As the god once weighed the human heart for worthiness, Anubis balances out decadence with pragmatism, sex with promises, reality with molten imagination.

Tobacco Rose is my pick of Liz Moore’s three wonderful fragrances, but then I am biased about all things rosaceous. It is an earthy, slutty rose and such a delight to find a scent that makes me examine again my love for this most fickle harlot of floral design. I am wearing it again tonight in the still of a dimly lit room. My apartment is exquisitely quiet. I am beautifully tired and my wrists smell of cigars stubbed out in rose jam. How bloody fantastic is that…?

Liz will be launching her three Papillon fragrances on June 21^st 2014, Midsummer’s Day which Liz hopes (and I do too…) will be an auspicious day for her and Papillon. I wish her all the luck in the world.

Papillon can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/PapillonPerfumery?fref=ts

https://twitter.com/PapillonPerfum

Liz kindly said she can be contacted at the Papillon office if anyone wants to chat, the number is +44(0)20 3691 8822 or alternatively the studio mobile is +44(0)7825 550557

Auto Seduction - The Scent of Interiors: ‘Italian Leather’ (& A Little Irish…) by Memo Fragrances

Memo is a discreet and luxurious brand, a word of mouth success, the scents suggested carefully to like-minded connoisseurs, skin savoured in pleasured appreciation. There is something rarified and apart about the alluring strangeness of the oeuvre. The fragrances feel expensive, finished, honed and polished, notes open like choral mouths, rolling and blossoming across welcome skin.

I have loved the brand quietly for years, wearing Siwa constantly and sometimes the heady holographic charms of Lalibela. Siwa’s plasticky warm blend of cereals, whiskey lactones, cinnamon leaf, popcorn, narcissus and vanilla wears like silicone on my skin. I smell like an replicant. I loved it from the very first moment I tried it and have never tired of its alien melted beauty. Lalibela is another one of my obsessive rose scents. It takes it name from Lalibela, a sacred place in Ethiopia where it is said angels came down to build twelve churches, all hewn from solid rock. The fragrance reeks of transcendental rose, joyous and fevered. Orchid and jasmine hold to the skin white-hot intensity as the rose seems to smoulder, ably abetted by really rich labdanum, tobacco, vanilla and frankincense notes. Everything smells offered up, sacrificial and sacred.

Memo (short for memory)is Clara and John Molloy. He is Irish, raised around horses in Tipperary, she is Andalusian, but raised in Paris. They are based now in Geneva after many years in Paris. They met apparently on a ski lift, suspended between earth and sky. I like this image of love blossoming mid-air, rootless, under a nurturing vault of blue.

John Molloy is the businessman, with a background at LVMH and L’Oréal. Beautiful Clara is the dreamer, explorer and creative director. In the 90’s she worked in editing and the world of magazine supplements and then in 2007 decided to write a book entitled 22 Perfumers where she interviewed many of the worlds most influential noses. This infected her with the perfume bug. So together with talented IFF nose Aliénor Massenet, one of the 22 perfumers, globe-trotting Clara set out to create a unique body of olfactive work inspired by her journeys. As the motto of the brand says… ‘The journey is the destination’. This is something many perfume noses forget in their scramble for our dollar; the inherent joy in travelling with a scent, living the notes, seeing places, smelling trees, mountains, rivers, feeling the sun and rain on skin, sand and snow underfoot. 

The fragrances romance and distill experience. There is subtlety and beauty expressed in formulae of great tenderness and complexity. Each of the Memo fragrances is a reflection of a specific place and Clara’s reaction to it, filtered through the persuasive perfumed lens of Massenet. Clara uses scrapbooks as she travels to record her thoughts and experiences, noting sensations and emotions linked to places. It was this attention to traveling detail that first attracted me to Memo fragrances. I had read an article in a French magazine about the creation of Siwa, the scent-sation of an oasis night, described by Clara Molloy as feeling like a sort of cover, fur, something comforting. And it’s true I wear to to bed or when I am sad, it cradles me.

This fascinated me, this attempt to translate an emotional response to a time and place into notes, facets and accords. It is very hard to do with any degree of grace and harmony. Fragrances of this ilk are often sledgehammer subtle, deliberately using dull unimaginative scent, spice, floral combinations to suggest building blocks not the overall picture. What Clara Molloy and Aliénor Massenet have done is provide a series of poignantly charged scentscapes that allows us to see the world through olfactory constructs and personal vision.

Strawberries & Asphalt - Trespassing on the Senses with Imaginary Authors

I think I might be a little bit in love with Josh Meyer, the self-taught alchemist behind Imaginary Authors; his scents feel like billets doux, love letters, perfumed epistles made just for my skin and mine alone. For someone who donned no scent at all for years, believing personal olfaction was somewhat conformist, Josh has certainly travelled quite an abstract and fertile road to the point of releasing a library of remarkably quixotic and romantic olfactory tomes.

I first came across Imaginary Authors last year, intrigued by the concept of fragrances inspired by created writers and their imagined literary works. The writers were an eclectic mix, echoing Plath, Salinger, Capote, McCullers, Dickenson, Hemmingway, Kerouac etc. Americana incarnate in fact, filtered through the medium of imagined prose and literary biography. The look of Imaginary Authors is just delightful, a studied mix of whimsy and retro art publications, geometric prints, bright colours, surrealist homage, Dadaism and flashes of Warhol, Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns.

Now this simmering brew of influences and arch references could have gone horribly wrong, coming across as chichi and pretentious, a sly hipster conflagration of twee themes and over-reaching ambition. But Josh has tight control over his motifs and never loses sight of the most important factor – the juices themselves. It is an ambitious collection, some are exceptional and they rise to their literary aspirations with wit, charisma and charm.

For me, Imaginary Authors has a refined vintage quality, the fragrances have resonance and strong personalities, echoing their authors and novels but also in a wider sense paying homage to a love of beauty, sensation, skin, and desire. The sense of lives and loves inhabited is quite potent and heartfelt. Pictures are painted, characters come alive, kiss, fuck and die. I was worried initially that the fictional imposition of ideas might colour my interpretation of the odours in the multifarious scents, but in fact I was enriched by the additional creative marginalia. As I sampled and sniffed, inhaling various pieces of skin, I replayed over in my head Josh’s fictions alongside the development of his strange family of delicious scents.

I ordered the sample pack from the Imaginary Authors website and they arrived promptly with a lovely hand-written note from Josh himself thanking me for taking an interest in his brand. This is the difference with niche and artisanal perfumery, the personal touch. Orders and generous samples from Bloom Perfumery, 4160 Tuesdays, Oriza L. Legrand, Mona di Orio, Viktoria Minya and Vero Perfumo for example have all been sent with personal notes from the perfumers or owners themselves. These little details, a chance to feel just a touch more connected are very important in this rapidly desensitising and impolite world. And while there is grumbling about the ever-increasing growth in the niche sector and the actual definition of niche itself, it is these grounded and connective moments that matter to perfume lovers.

 Now Josh is a relative late bloomer in terms of perfumery, really only starting his conversion to the scented arts in 2010, launching his lines in 2102. Quite impressive considering the quality of the fragrances he has imagined. After a peripatetic youth he settled in Portland and wondered how to channel his intense creative spirit. Everyone toys with music, art, words and performance in their lives and in a very charming interview with Olfactif, Josh reveals that his preoccupation with straight razors and interacting with the obsessive Badger and Blade community put him in contact with a guy who started including scent samples from brands like Knize Ten, Parfumerie Générale and Annick Goutal that slowly began to re-shape Josh’s senses regarding the world of fragrance, a world until then he had dismissed as conformist and somewhat suffocating.

When that moment of niche or artisanal revelation happens to us, the fall is vertiginous. I have never quite lost my tethering to high street and mainstream scent, they can be so glorious and nostalgic, still occasionally stopping me in my tracks and truly surprising me. I expect niche to be different and experimental. When mainstream scent plays with convention and form, the results can still be dazzling and brave. Niche by definition must work a little harder.

Contemplation & Enchantment: The House of Oriza L. Legrand &‘Rélique D’Amour’

I love a vintage fragrance house. I mean a real vintage house, with dusty cobwebbed doors, crumbling damp walls, a bloom of mould, reeking of yesteryear, powdered ghosts roaming forgotten boudoirs and chapels reeking of fumy yesteryear. So many Houses either bury their past or fake and embellish the lineage, claiming false descendants, dubious provenance and elaborate reconstructions of past glories. Sometimes this is carried out with consummate brio, but there has to be full transparency and honesty about what it going on and the work being done with formulations and the olfactory genealogy otherwise the undertaking can seem pretentious and contrived.   

I was alerted to the existence of Oriza L. Legrand by a friend and fellow perfume lover, Barry Wa. He has beautiful taste in scent and started a thread on Basenotes (as Prince Barry) about Oriza after finding there was hardly any info on the House out in the electronic ether. This thread grows week by week and really has raised the profile of this exquisite house. So I really have to thank Barry for sharing his love of Oriza with me.

There has been a resurgence in recent years of old fragrances house opening up their creaking vaults and re-launching their vintage style perfumes, soaps, creams and powders. Many old houses have died and taken their olfactory secrets to their powdered graves. Fashion and eras are fickle, taste is a brutal arbiter. In many ways this is how it should be, time moves on. A few truly inspirational and timeless behemoths survive through sheer force of adaptive will, modernisation, money, timing and sometimes luck. Chanel, Dior, Lauder, Guerlain, Caron (perhaps to a lesser degree) have seen off time and countless competitors to be with us today, still creating perfume that stands the test of time. Of course their work is different from originals, nothing is ever quite the same. But arguably the spirit remains.

Over time, smaller more unique Houses all over Europe have decayed into oblivion after years of fashionability, influence and popularity. Some of them, Floris, Creed, Penhaligon’s, Santa Maria Novella have survived into the modern era though, cautiously and not without problems and an erosion of credibilty.

Elisabeth de Feydeau, the French writer, lecturer and fragrance historian is credited by many for the resurgence in fascination with older lost houses, particularly French perfumeries. Elisabeth is an outstanding and illuminating writer, full of wit and charm, her knowledge of perfumery is both extensive and esoteric. Her book A Scented Palace: The Secret History of Marie Antoinette's Perfumer, published in France in 2005 - elsewhere in 2006 - was a wonderful portrait of the life of Jean-Louis Fargeon, fiercely loyal perfumer to Marie-Antoinette. The work oozes with astute period detail but most importantly places the production of perfume firmly at the centre of the story. To coincide with the publication of the book, perfumer Francis Kurkdjian created a scent called Sillage de la Reine, inspired as closely as possible by Fargeon’s consultations with the Queen, trying to capture the scent of Trianon for her. Again working with and inspired by Elisabeth’s passion and research, Sillage de la Reine was assembled with notes of rose, iris, cut jasmine, tuberose and orange blossom enhanced with delicate touches of cedar and sandalwood. Tonkin musk and precious ambergris round off a deep and rich formulation. The project was a popular and critical success.

Elisabeth de Feydeau’s research and obsession with this particular period has allowed us to form a more detailed understanding of perfumery and the people whose passions and talents drove the early days of this most ephemeral and sensual of the arts. A good example is The House of Lubin, originally founded in 1798 and resurrected in 2004 by Gilles Thevenin after many years of decline, with the launch of the stunning Idole by Olivia Giacobetti, a dense blend of sugar cane, rum, saffron, cumin, doum palm and leather. By mixing new releases with re-orchestrations of vintage Lubin formulas, the house has successfully revived itself. The English house Atkinson’s re-launched itself recently, re-branding in the process but still retaining its quintessentially stiff upper lip playfulness. Other existing Houses such as Chanel, Dior, Guerlain, YSL plunder their archives and re-release classics, tweaking here and there and in some cases just overhauling the fragrances and creating an homage or variant of the original.          

It is impossible to exactly recreate the original antique perfumes of yesteryear. And even if you could, the chances are, you would fall very foul indeed of IFRA, the body that regularly makes minute yet far-reaching pronouncements on what is to be used in the elaborate construction of the perfumes we choose to wear. We are all aware that exact replication is well nigh on impossible, but perfumery in the spirit of a certain time and place, using atmospheric and timely raw materials can still potentially yield heart-stopping and moving results.

Voodoo Smellin’ Thing…: ‘Mississippi Medicine’ by D.S.& Durga

As this singular formula dries down, I smell ritualistic hoodoo and hex muttered over muddy, pine-crackling fire. You can almost feel smoke in your eyes as prayers roll off tongues to gods and monsters. Underlying the intense verdant smouldering is a pretty obsessive carnivorous hickory note, as if meat were cooking somewhere, animal fats dropped into the fire. It’s a disconcerting effect to say the least, a hint of sacrifice mixed with devout religious observance. Like Norne by Slumberhouse, D.S. & Durga’s Mississippi Medicine is another very different and audacious assault on olfaction. Deeply complex, symbolic and full of archaic wonder. 

I really love this quirky and erudite Brooklyn-based niche brand. Founded by the graceful and modish husband and wife team of David and Kavi Moltz, D.S. & Durga has established themselves as one of the most intriguing and innovative perfume houses in recent years. David is the perfumer and creator of the houses perceptive and atmospheric formulae. Kavi is the architect of the brand’s design, bottles, packaging etc. But you get the impression reading interviews with this gifted couple how symbiotic their relationship is and how much they feed off each other’s artistic and creative processes.  

 David & Kavi Moltz

D.S.& Durga is very much a house steeped in the romance of Americana and the beauty of wordsmithery. I was drawn to the names of the fragrances and the sheer beauty of the brand’s illustrations, bottles and artistic website. So much consideration has been put into how the fragrances are perceived. When you enter the D.S.& Durga world you participate in an lost history, one where cowboys roam lazy dry plains, grass burns in the night, lonely fiddles drawl in the darkness, fur-trappers haul beaver pelts, arrows fly, dresses snag in Siberian snow and ritual incantations are muttered over mud and flame. 

The brand was founded in 2007 making small batches of scented produce for friends and family. Indeed the boxes proudly proclaim small batch handmade olfactory tonics and aromatic formulations. There is something calm and collected about the Moltzs, they have a strong sense of self-belief and have managed to walk that somewhat difficult line between personal indulgence and artistic expression with understated aplomb. The creation of the fragrances involves huge amounts of research in raw materials, influences and I think uniquely – atmosphere. There is a feel of painters and sculptors at work. Images of David Moltz in his leather apron over crisp white shirt, dipping his nose to vials, bottles and beakers against walls covered in sketches, notes, paintings and swatches are more akin to snapshots of painters working in lofts in the 70s and 80s. The scents reek of hidden passions and obsessions. Drops of history and storytelling swirled into grasses, resins, smoke and wild flowers. Names like Bowmakers, Cowboy Grass, Burning Barbershop, Silent Grove, Spent Musket Oil, Boston Ivy, Siberian Snow and Freetrapper instantly conjure up the most evocative scents capes.

I think sometimes fragrance houses forget how powerful a name can be, how much of a psychological pull it can exert on a potential wearer. Of course the juice matters, but romancing and seducing your audience with thought-provoking and cinematic names is something many brands neglect to their cost. David and Kavi Moltz have thought long and hard about how to present their precious brand and it shows. It oozes personality. There is a cool, must-have vibe to it, but not in an irritating hipster way that seems to permeate so many small-scale operations. The roots of the brand lie in 2007 Brooklyn as the US economy struggled with debt and the shadows and collapses of large scale manufacturing processes. In Brooklyn there was a resurgence of interest in all aspects of artisanal work, pushing and developing craft skills to provide a quality product be it skincare, scent, leather, furniture, glass or chocolate.

David Moltz’s deep connection to the bones of fragrance go back to winning a bottle of Pierre Cardin cologne in a summer camp raffle when he was a boy. There is music in his blood and he moved in New York in 2002. Kavi studied architecture in LA and design in Holland, but travelled extensively as a child. She met David after returning to New York to start work as an architect. The brand started privately, concocting formulae for friends, small batches of very precise perfumes and colognes. This artisanal approach, in keeping with the ethos of the time and their milieu was to inform everything they would do. Kavi realised she could utilise her artistic and architectural skills to contain and design the products the couple were producing. The bottles and packaging are very distinctive utilising elegant lines, just the right amount of historical reference and a simple strong clear flacon that highlights the delicate shades of bottled juice.