2
Helpful Review
24th Century Incense. More Ender's Game than end game.
Incense/resin is one of my favorite perfume categories overall, and I think it resoundingly has to do with a certain amount of Catholic guilt combined with nostalgia. I'd read so much about how this was the final boss/end game of incense scents, and I suppose it could be if your final boss is more NeoCatholic in the 24th century from Altered Carbon than the gilded, candle-lit Catholicism that's been embedded in my memory.
This scent is not warm. It is not opulent. It is cold, harsh, and almost surgically clean. In and of itself this isn't problematic at all, and I have other scents in my collection that could also be described that way. If I could divorce my personal associations with Catholicism, could even enjoy this scent.
For better or worse though, I'm struggling to enjoy it as an olfactory experience. On the formula side, the coriander is simply too much for me. It's too savory, too strangely salty, and too soapy. Oddly enough I had a nun principal in grade school who called the bathrooms "lavatories", and would often shorten the word to "lavs", and for me this scent is more "bathroom" than it is "church". I'm sure there's a purification connotation that I'm missing here, but alas.
Considering how much I've talked about my associations with Catholicism and the nostalgia I have for it both in scent and also in visualization, this scent just doesn't come off as liturgical. Monastic? Yes. Strangely minimal? Absolutely. I would imagine this is what a monastery that requires a vow of silence smells like, but that's not an experience many of us have to pull nostalgia from.
I'm left feeling that I'm ultimately not smart enough or avant-garde enough or that I just don't have the correct experiences to "get" this scent. However, I actually really like that about it. It's literally meditative for me. It evokes an equal but almost opposite reaction in me akin to the one I had when smelling DEIXIS by Fzotic for the first time, and these two incense/resin scents could not be further from each other on that spectrum.
Ultimately, I think I could add this to my collection because it's caused such a unique reaction in me, and because of its overall notoriety and out of respect for what it. It would be a true "collector's fragrance" for me, in that it's more something to be admired than it is to be worn.
This scent is not warm. It is not opulent. It is cold, harsh, and almost surgically clean. In and of itself this isn't problematic at all, and I have other scents in my collection that could also be described that way. If I could divorce my personal associations with Catholicism, could even enjoy this scent.
For better or worse though, I'm struggling to enjoy it as an olfactory experience. On the formula side, the coriander is simply too much for me. It's too savory, too strangely salty, and too soapy. Oddly enough I had a nun principal in grade school who called the bathrooms "lavatories", and would often shorten the word to "lavs", and for me this scent is more "bathroom" than it is "church". I'm sure there's a purification connotation that I'm missing here, but alas.
Considering how much I've talked about my associations with Catholicism and the nostalgia I have for it both in scent and also in visualization, this scent just doesn't come off as liturgical. Monastic? Yes. Strangely minimal? Absolutely. I would imagine this is what a monastery that requires a vow of silence smells like, but that's not an experience many of us have to pull nostalgia from.
I'm left feeling that I'm ultimately not smart enough or avant-garde enough or that I just don't have the correct experiences to "get" this scent. However, I actually really like that about it. It's literally meditative for me. It evokes an equal but almost opposite reaction in me akin to the one I had when smelling DEIXIS by Fzotic for the first time, and these two incense/resin scents could not be further from each other on that spectrum.
Ultimately, I think I could add this to my collection because it's caused such a unique reaction in me, and because of its overall notoriety and out of respect for what it. It would be a true "collector's fragrance" for me, in that it's more something to be admired than it is to be worn.