Top Notes 
Yuzu
Heart Notes 
Jasminum grandiflorum
Peach
Ylang-ylang
Base Notes 
Ambergris
Royal poinciana
Vanilla05/23/2025
ClaireV
958 Reviews
ClaireV
1
Licked skin and peach honey
I smell Palimpsest out of order, with the breathy oud (usually a base note) the first to strike my nose. This isn’t really oud at all, of course, but firewood, an essential oil from an African tree (of which I own a tiny vial), interacting with a stale, marshy ambergris. Then the ylang, honey, fruit notes – all in various stages of intensity – rise up and fall back in patterns that are not that easy to follow.
This seems appropriate, given that the word palimpsest refers to a text where the previous words have been erased to allow for new ones to be written, but sometimes peek through, offering us a glimpse of what was originally there. In Palimpsest, notes come and go, folding back over one another, erasing and then revealing their former selves. At times all you smell is stale wood, and at others, the unctuous rot of a hunk of agarwood smeared with old honey and left to fester in a steamy jungle. At other times, a buttery, sunlit ylang. The texture also vacillates. Palimpsest is simultaneously dusty and wet, smoky and oily.
For a long stretch, past the woody opening, Palimpsest lingers on honey, specifically the organic stuff that smells like malt, wildflowers, and pine bark. This is a very Vero Kern-ish sort of honey – saliva-ish, musky, licked skin and all. Withered peach skin flits in and out, slicing through air thick with agarwood dust motes. At some point, the ylang makes a run for it. Or maybe it was always there, and I just notice it now. Loud and happy, the fat banana fingers of the ylang hydrate every inch of the heretofore dry, slightly stale wood-honey surface of the scent, filling its desiccated pores with peachy butter and tropical pancake syrup.
Palimpsest, in being simultaneously as languid as a peach, as high-pitched as honey, and as leathery as agarwood, reminds me of Sepia or Tango (also by Aftelier Perfumes) in that they are all very complex, almost puzzling scents that take some time to pick apart. In fact, I am not sure that something like Palimpsest belongs in a category as straightforward as ylang. It is part of the arcane library of scent imaginings of Vero Kern and Mandy Aftel, books that will forever remain stranded in the ‘uncategorizable’ section. I never thought of Mandy Aftel’s work and Vero Kern’s work as being similar, and really, they are not – but perhaps there is a certain (female) non-linear way of thinking about notes and accords that acts as a common thread.
This seems appropriate, given that the word palimpsest refers to a text where the previous words have been erased to allow for new ones to be written, but sometimes peek through, offering us a glimpse of what was originally there. In Palimpsest, notes come and go, folding back over one another, erasing and then revealing their former selves. At times all you smell is stale wood, and at others, the unctuous rot of a hunk of agarwood smeared with old honey and left to fester in a steamy jungle. At other times, a buttery, sunlit ylang. The texture also vacillates. Palimpsest is simultaneously dusty and wet, smoky and oily.
For a long stretch, past the woody opening, Palimpsest lingers on honey, specifically the organic stuff that smells like malt, wildflowers, and pine bark. This is a very Vero Kern-ish sort of honey – saliva-ish, musky, licked skin and all. Withered peach skin flits in and out, slicing through air thick with agarwood dust motes. At some point, the ylang makes a run for it. Or maybe it was always there, and I just notice it now. Loud and happy, the fat banana fingers of the ylang hydrate every inch of the heretofore dry, slightly stale wood-honey surface of the scent, filling its desiccated pores with peachy butter and tropical pancake syrup.
Palimpsest, in being simultaneously as languid as a peach, as high-pitched as honey, and as leathery as agarwood, reminds me of Sepia or Tango (also by Aftelier Perfumes) in that they are all very complex, almost puzzling scents that take some time to pick apart. In fact, I am not sure that something like Palimpsest belongs in a category as straightforward as ylang. It is part of the arcane library of scent imaginings of Vero Kern and Mandy Aftel, books that will forever remain stranded in the ‘uncategorizable’ section. I never thought of Mandy Aftel’s work and Vero Kern’s work as being similar, and really, they are not – but perhaps there is a certain (female) non-linear way of thinking about notes and accords that acts as a common thread.
Rachelg
