BD Mallo 2023

Suddenly you were there. A creature of the night with glowing eyes in the shadow of the new moon. You wrapped me in black flowers until brittle wood and leather strips melted into cat fur, and before I could realize it, I was you. In all those dark hours, I felt your amber-soft hand on my forehead and feverish flesh. In those sleepless nights when the breaths of unsaid words grew louder and louder. Because in the light we are all ready to taste sweet lies when hearts are hungry. Then we keep silent to keep the small world in order, dreaming of the happiness of the future to forget that the present has long since become the past.
Lead me to where my thoughts are. Listen to the unspoken words skin to skin at my side, because the unspoken speaks at night and its truths are bitter, even when the black wings of the moths smoothly brush over the surging waves, jasmine blossoms unfurl in slow motion, something much older than us lies over our souls. Then your leather hand closes around my wrist. Firmly. Gently. Just one step. A willing stumble into the familiar darkness. Because you don't shy away from my abysses, you are reflected in them, and so I close my eyes, intoxicated by the feeling of dizziness, when we lose the wooden floors beneath our feet, let ourselves drift in the stream of time, souls touching in a place that never was and yet always will be.

***

Whenever I smell BD, Patti Smith whispers in my ear: "Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire." And because I would never dare to contradict Patti Smith, I wear BD with all the passion I can muster. But is it just my eternal olfactory desire for dark flowers and coarse leather together with my boundless admiration for Patti Smith that makes this fragrance stay with me? From a purely rational-analytical point of view, BD is not particularly complex: a truckload of hallucinogenic jasmine meets medicinal, leathery castoreum, which is clearly perceptible from the outset, offsetting the sultry indolicity of the flowers with its bitter accents, while increasingly audible civet notes begin to purr. The facets of dark Assam oud, which I find sometimes brittle, sometimes soft, provide a supporting backbone on which the floral tendrils snake ever higher up into the night sky, supported by liquidambra (which, according to my research, should be more or less equivalent to styrax), which softens the edgy animalism of the robust leather notes with sweet balsamic warmth.
On his homepage, Antonio Lasheras, who says very little about his fragrances and prefers to let them speak for themselves, describes BD as a "vintage floral fragrance" - and, yes, of course that hits the nail on the head. Blind-tested, I would definitely have guessed a lost fragrance legend from the 1920s or 1930s, but BD seems to me to be so much more than that. In its dark opulence and abysmal passion, the fragrance stands above mundane categories such as time and space. BD floats between worlds, between times, between souls and comes so incredibly close to me. There is a shattering honesty in the clear language of this fragrance and a physicality that takes no prisoners and that I no longer want to do without, even though I may not always be equally up to it.