Top Notes 
Ginger
Orange
Heart Notes 
Champaca flower
Coffee CO2
Base Notes 
Blond tobacco
Choya Loban
Tonka bean05/30/2025
ClaireV
958 Reviews
ClaireV
1
The tarpaulin shore
Can a leather skin be cured by the sea? Because that’s what Tango smells like to me, at first. There’s a mentholated, charred smell, like sweet black rubber mixed with the salty grime of marine silt, smoke, rocks, and sun-baked minerals. Although I know that there isn’t any ambergris in Tango, it suggests itself as thus to my mind through Mandy’s use of choya nakh, a destructive distillation of sea shells typically used to give traditional Indian attars a smoky, leathery undertone.
Someone on the sample pass I hosted made laugh with his experience with Tango in a Lyft ride to work: “I’m pretty sure the fellow passengers must have thought I lived with a ferret.” Yes, Tango is quite gamey and grimy, at least to start with. But there is also a light-strobing note in Tango that smells like one of those fizzy, orange-flavored vitamin tablets dropped into a glass of water after a heavy night out; sugary, viciously upbeat, and with a lime-carnation effervescence that recalls Coca Cola from Mexico. The fizzing orange and champaca florals sift through the oud-like funk, separating it out into bright, shifting layers. Sometimes, I visualize Tango as a coat that Lady Miss Kier of Deee-Lite might have worn in Groove is in the Heart – a thin citroline pleather in bright orange, lined with brown bear fur.
The contrast between the gamey, tarpaulin darkness of the seashell-cured leather and the candied, joyful buzz of the citrus is truly what makes this perfume sing, and yes, transcend its own raw materials. I don’t find myself, for example, picking over the debris of champaca, or ginger, or choya nakh in my mind when I wear it; I’m just thinking that it’s such an unusual and quixotic perfume. That feeling is what elevates Tango to art, rather than just a smell, or a loose grouping together of essential oils and absolutes. Vivid images jump into my brain when I wear it, a synergistic and synesthesiastic experience: sunshine on petrol, milk on dirt, orange fireworks across a dark, starless sky.
Someone on the sample pass I hosted made laugh with his experience with Tango in a Lyft ride to work: “I’m pretty sure the fellow passengers must have thought I lived with a ferret.” Yes, Tango is quite gamey and grimy, at least to start with. But there is also a light-strobing note in Tango that smells like one of those fizzy, orange-flavored vitamin tablets dropped into a glass of water after a heavy night out; sugary, viciously upbeat, and with a lime-carnation effervescence that recalls Coca Cola from Mexico. The fizzing orange and champaca florals sift through the oud-like funk, separating it out into bright, shifting layers. Sometimes, I visualize Tango as a coat that Lady Miss Kier of Deee-Lite might have worn in Groove is in the Heart – a thin citroline pleather in bright orange, lined with brown bear fur.
The contrast between the gamey, tarpaulin darkness of the seashell-cured leather and the candied, joyful buzz of the citrus is truly what makes this perfume sing, and yes, transcend its own raw materials. I don’t find myself, for example, picking over the debris of champaca, or ginger, or choya nakh in my mind when I wear it; I’m just thinking that it’s such an unusual and quixotic perfume. That feeling is what elevates Tango to art, rather than just a smell, or a loose grouping together of essential oils and absolutes. Vivid images jump into my brain when I wear it, a synergistic and synesthesiastic experience: sunshine on petrol, milk on dirt, orange fireworks across a dark, starless sky.
