“This brand is a natural progression in my fragrance journey. A journey that started with smelling fragrances at the mall, to exploring niche and indie houses…fragrances made around the world! I found the fragrance community on YouTube and began reviewing fragrances that I found compelling. My taste tends to lean towards creative and enjoyable scents and I love unique and complex blends…”
HOUSE: Motif Olfactif
ORIGIN: USA
FRAGRANCE: Huaka’i, Makai, Mon Oasis, Vêtu de Vert
NOSE: Oswald Pare
SIZE/COST: 50ml / Prices + Availability Vary
Huaka’i (2020, Extrait de Parfum 25%): This is a multi-level fragrance, there is so much going on, it’s like an amusement park at full tilt – just one that smells much better than sweat and regret. Although, that depends on the individual wearer of course. This gives me all that vivid spectrum of color that often comes from East Asian spices, mixed here with a rich balsamic orientation. Oud and patchouli carry this flight of fancy to a new, higher level. It’s got glints of lemony brightness without an ounce of citrus, and its balanced by warm florals that just seem to blur into the larger canvas here. This is meticulous and sly, sugared with a bitter low end. And once the sandalwood accord hits your passages you may become so entranced that the time of day no longer has as much meaning. And along the way, from start to finish, there is this thin green note that follows you, keeping you mindful of where all of these natural embellishments came from. This completely unique fragrance takes you on a journey, on a journey to the center of your soul. (87%)
Notes: cypress leaf, fir balsam, orris butter, spruce, champaca, galbanum, frangipani absolute, osmanthus absolute, Hawaiian sandalwood, Indian sandalwood, Indian oud, Vietnamese oud, aged patchouli
Makai (2020, Extrait de Parfum 20%): This has a sense of youth, clean and green and sweet of animated tropical mango. In a way this may seem truly unreal – especially to Westerners. Maybe those still in the lavish tropical rainforest might better understand this as ‘normal’? If you are seeking something fruity but lighter than cotton candy and half as sweet you may have found paradise. And its rising. Oh, the build of this perfume is unexpectedly a bit of a metamorphosis. But make no mistake, the scene is one that includes the sand, the sea and the sky. But just as Alfred Steiglitz’s most beloved ‘Equivalents’ series (made one hundred years ago) had people in awe, the clouds in this composition are as puffy, white and heavenly. It poses a sort of clean that is as if you went from a bubble bath into being enrobed in such transient meteorologic vastness. It goes creamy and sudsy from the midpoint onward, leaving a whisper of fruity residue, like a fine layer of ghostly glacial gloss, just radiating from your skin. (85%)
Notes: green mango skin, a fluffy cloud of musk, hints of sea breeze & creamy woods
Mon Oasis (2019, EDP): At first there’s this trickle of unfamiliar fruit on a particularly dewy morning, just hanging there, bulbous from the branches in a rural setting. Those branches reaching like fingers, the fruit growing exponentially like some strange alien experiment, almost like a scene right out of the animated French classic Fantastic Planet (1973). The tone thickens, there emits a warming sense of something folksy, like being transported out on to a country road just after the rain, with the intermittent aroma of lavender perfuming the air scantily. Clean, juicy, and somewhat allegorical of time and place, this perfume offers a heady waft of something sweetly rustic, but there’s more. It’s quite comforting actually. It boasts an echo of oakmoss, and then offers the essence of wooden hues as soft as they can possibly be. This, to my delicate passages, provides a certain type of respite, especially for urbanites and metrosexuals everywhere, you know who you are. (84%)
Notes: yuzu, pear, lavenders, vetiver, oakmoss, hay absolute, tobacco absolute, sandalwood, jasmine, musk, cedar
Vêtu de Vert (2020, Extrait de Parfum 30%): Darkly green and incredibly enigmatic. Now that I’ve tried nearly every creation from the house I can certainly acknowledge Vêtu de Vert as my official go-to favorite, bar none. It comes on unexpectedly and its probably one of their most peculiar perfumes. Offering a certain variety of vetiver that has an edgy, warming cannabis tonality. Yet it is, in fact hallucinatory to some extent, at least at the opening, the citrus that induces this accord is something to be experienced, and in such a spectacular way. The blend of incense and patchouli is intensely disarming and profound. I have to take a step back to gain my composure, or else I’ll fall into a vortex of the subliminal.
Thirty Minutes Later….upon my return, nose to skin, I’m right back exactly where I was, same good trouble, same impossible dilemma, and so it goes. This simply seduced me. The earthiness keeps a few toes grounded while the olfactory cortex is no longer resisting. It’s as though I’ve been shrunken as to better appreciate micro greens and the dirt from which is rises, the zest that lingers along with the entire forested ecosphere. This is perfume as a true art form, just brilliant! (96%)
Notes: vetiver, yuzu, bergamot, cypress, oakmoss, frankincense, cedarwood, Indian sandalwood, myrrh, patchouli, clean wet soil, hinoki wood, ylang, jasmine, neroli
Recommended Soundtrack / Create Your Own Playlist:
William Basinski, Tangerine Dream, Christopher Bissonnette, Silver Apples, Guru Guru, Spiritualized, Harold Budd
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