This strange time generates strange scents, though their strangeness is comforting, equal parts loneliness and love. I have spent certain Christmas Eves sitting on smooth, unfamiliar wood pews under the tall, chilled stone vaults of borrowed religions, and like everyone, I know the darker, private Christmas smells: thick candle wax, burned wick, cold, incense, smoke, fire.
Smoke fills many perfumes. Some are misfires; Yves Saint Laurent’s M7 might do better if it didn’t smell like a Renault engine in flames: burned rubber, seared chrome, frying polyethylene. It was as alarming as a flashing red light. But some smoke perfumes are as seductive as a kiss: Dzongkha. Here is an exquisite scent as mysterious — and as fragrant — as Orthodox icons covered in the sweet soot of a thousand years of devotional candles. It was created for L’Artisan Parfumeur by the perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour after a visit to Bhutan. It smells of old, rich charred wood and pure dust and resin, and if there is any perfume that carries the ancient holiness of the season, this is it.
“O tidings of comfort and joy,” carolers sing. Ambra di Venezia is a perfume whose warm, jewel-like clarity manages the trick of being completely unclassifiable. It was created by Rayda Vega for the New York designer Montgomery Taylor, who once saw an orange sunset in a purple Venetian sky and asked for that evening in scent. I’ve never smelled anything quite like the result — not a floral, not an amber, this is a rich sweetness, creamy velvet like a glass of Sicilian passito. I have never offered it to anyone who did not inhale and instantly relax, reassured as if by a caress. Which makes Ambra di Venezia’s classification clear: it is angelic — the scent of comfort and joy.
The angels sang to astonished shepherds under cold stars over fields of scrub herbs and stones. At a dinner party in Paris about five years ago, the perfumer Celine Ellena was served a glass of Paris tap water from a carafe containing a single stalk of vetiver root. (It was, said the hostess, a custom she’d found while traveling in Africa.) Ellena tasted the salt of the water, the herb perfuming it, and it anchored strangely in her memory. Ellena is now the in-house perfumer for the Parisian niche house Different Company, which recently introduced her Sel de Vétiver. It is a riveting scent, a perfume that smells of salt, ancient aquifer and limestone, with the brace of gin and juniper. Sel de Vétiver could not be more distinct, as unearthly as a god born in the cold under an eerily bright star.
Dzongkha **** L’Artisan Parfumeur
Ambra di Venezia **** Montgomery Taylor
Sel de Vétiver ***** The Different Company
