There is an eerie feeling upon coming across a ghost town, the very
cinematic experience of bypassing a highway into a smaller, abandonded
scenic route into the vast countryside; all silence in the distance and
blue skies passing you by above. In America ghost towns are something of
a fixture in the collective unconscious, a remnant of the wild west
past, the advent of industrialism and the building of autoroutes erasing
bustling cities from the map.
The desolate beauty of the ruins,
standing abandonded as if replete with tales of lives spent heard in
whispers on the wind that blows amongst the delapidated buildings,
inspired indie perfume Mandy Aftel (Aftelier perfumes) into creating an
all-naturals perfume that would put decay into an elegant context, into a
wearable form translating the ravages of time.
Sepia
by Aftelier, the resulting perfume, utilizes the most refined
and dignified of materials of sweet decay: oud wood mulling over
floating ambergris; blanched, matured, patina-bearing, ghost-like...
The
musty feel of both oud and cepes (the latter being the raw and damp
smelling, peculiar essence of mushrooms, exalted in Mandy's
Cepes and Tuberose)
come out in the composition as seen through a sieve; their chunkier
elements surfacing, while the rest is retreating into the distance like
the vision of a ghost town while traversing through those abandonded
roads of the west. Even though intense -typically gourmand, but not
here!- notes such as cocoa, coffee and the multi-nuanced white tobacco
are also featured in the formula, the weaving is tight, none of them
peaking above the others. You'd be hard-pressed to distinguish one from
the other. This dry woods perfume doesn't make any compromise.
Instead
the floralcy of yellow mandarin along austere cedarwood and the musty notes open
Sepia,
predesposing someone for something strong which soon belies that
impression: the fragrance becomes earthier, darker and more mysterious
while continuously subtle. Aftel used other intriguing essences, such as
pink lotus for a lighter feel, a hint of wine facet from berry notes,
full bodied indolic jasmine and labdanum, usually the recipe for an animalic
floral.
Sepia however
defies such predictable seduction tricks. It is above all a play on
atmosphere, an inwards journey into what is left in our soul upon
encountering a mirage, an illusion, a decaying thing of beauty. Is it
there or is it not? And as such it is best savoured intellectually and
with all our senses on the alert.
Notes for Aftelier Sepia:
Top: blood cedarwood, yellow mandarin, pink
grapefruit
Middle: pink lotus, strawberry, jasmine
grandiflorum, cocoa, coffee
Base: flowering tobacco, oud, indole, ambergris,
cepes, labdanum
Sepia is available in liquid parfum (1.4oz), EDP spray
and sample spray atomizer, mini bottle and liquid sample vial
directly through the Aftelier site.
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