Venomrock101

Time for my favorite autumn fragrance to poke its head out. Cape Heartache is a beautiful fragrance that blends pine, fir, and strawberries to create the perfect isolated forest sanctuary most people dream of visiting some day. While it took me a bit to warm up to A City On Fire, this fragrance tickled my fancy immediately. Opening up with a strong blast of fir and pine needles, you’re immediately transported to a conifer woods. Shortly after that opening, strawberry enters the fray to sweeten up the experience before they balance out together with some woody notes to create a smooth blend that makes you feel like you’ve just woken up in a freshly oiled log cabin. The needle notes preventing the strawberry from becoming too cloying and sweet. There’s apparently a vanilla note present as well but strangely enough I don’t really pick it up at all. I would say that in my collection right now that this is the ying to Silver Mountain Water’s yang. I say this because while they both remind me of the experience of being deep in a forest, Cape Heartache is more like just walking through that forest while Silver Mountain Water would be like walking next to a river that passes through it. They still both accomplish their goals as fragrances, but to me I just get a similar vibe from the both of them even though they aren’t similar in scent or composition in the slightest. This fragrance really comes alive in the cold weather and I give it a hearty recommendation, but still try before you buy.

This fragrance should be talked about way more than it currently is, with Piotr easily being one of the most underrated perfumers currently out on the market, and Bluebijou is a great example as to why. Opening up with an intense sweet blueberry blast that GentScents describes perfectly as smelling incredibly similar to Candy Nerds, I was hooked almost immediately. The intensity of the blueberries soon falls off, but they stay consistently intermingled in the notes until the fragrance dies. This works perfectly to the fragrance's advantage as once the rest of the notes begin to come out and play, you get a very nice dark chocolate dipped blueberry experience, with sweet tobacco, truffle, and a hint of booze to round it all off. The chocolate note is incredibly realistic for dark chocolate and reminds me of a melted Dove dark chocolate bar, just the right amount of bitter to combat the sweetness of the blueberries and tobacco. I can easily recommend this or Piotr’s other more well known fragrance, Shihan (previously Sensei), as an entry point into the rest of his fragrances, as both are wonderfully divine in their own right. Try before you buy, but both are relatively hard to find so I wish you luck.

Pearfecto once again comes to show off Daniel’s skill with fruit in fragrances with perhaps his most ambitious and fruity fragrance to date. Wonderfully brewed, Pearfecto opens up with a strong blast of pear, melon, banana, and citruses that weaken later on, but manage to ride out the entire life of the fragrance. The pear remaining the strongest and most prevalent of the fruits through out, though I do feel the banana start to creep in a little more towards the end of the fragrance. Shortly after the strong initial opening, things start to calm down and find their places within the fragrance, with some of its darker aspects beginning to come through. The ambergris specifically sticks out to me as it gives the fragrance a sort humidity to it that leaves it wet and moist from start to finish, it’s saltiness also preventing the fragrance from becoming too sickly sweet. While I said that the humidity leaves it wet and moist it shouldn’t be confused with it being like dunking your head in water, it’s more closely like the air before a storm, where you can just smell the water in the air, hanging in the background. Surprisingly this fragrance was my first and to date only blind buy, and I’m very glad to say it was a successful one. But it could be different for you, so try it before you buy it.

Holy moly, Zoologist really knocked it out of the park with this fragrance. I ordered Koala as a sample the day it was finally released to the public and when it got here I managed to go through it within three days, and ordered a full bottle shortly after. My favorite part of this scent would probably have to be the menthol honey gumdrop accord. The menthol gives it a really unique kind of dusty scent that reminds me of Tiger Balm, while the eucalyptus comes and moistens it back up again leading to the perfect balance of dry and wet. Meanwhile, even though it’s not listed as a note, I get a really citric/lemony experience in the background of the fragrance that really brightens it up a lot, which I think may be one of the facets of the eucalyptus note. Just as the citrusy brightness sings, black tea and incense come and ground it to prevent it from becoming too overpowering in the fragrance. The black tea reminding me slightly of Le Labo’s Thé Noir 29, but obviously not featured as strongly as in that fragrance. This fragrance is just amazingly blended and managed to put all the notes together in a way where they just compliment each other all the way through the fragrance’s life on my body, and I honestly just don’t have much else to say about it. You just have to try it and experience it for yourself because it, almost overnight, rose to become my favorite scent from this house. Big kudos to Victor and Spyros.

I find this to be a gourmand green. There is just something that is distinctly food in this fragrance that I can’t particularly pinpoint, but it just smells like food. My guess would be the wasabi note, but alas I’m not experienced enough in the world of perfumery to truly pick that out as the sole defining factor as there is quite a few other spices present in this fragrance. Maybe because of its food-like nature, this green happens to be a very dark green to me. Typically with greens there is usually a brightness to them, like newly budded leaves or fresh cut grass, but in this I find none. While dark though, there is nothing really overpowering about this scent at all, in fact there’s an almost airy quality to the fragrance. It’s kinda weird, almost ghostly. Like you walked in onto some kind of open-air ritual in progress, there’s a heaviness to the air that you walked into, but also the distinct note of the air itself. A smoke machine on a dance floor, you can see the smoke and you know it’s there but it doesn’t stop you from seeing your friends, or the DJ, or anything really, it just adds to the effect. Because of how deep yet airy this fragrance is I’d consider it a year-rounder. It’s light enough to be worn in the summer but also has enough heft to it from the spices and incense present in the fragrance that it can cut through the colder air. I really enjoy this fragrance but it is definitely a try before you buy kinda scent.