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 comprehend it, I was you. In all those dark hours, I felt your amber-soft hand on my forehead and the feverish flesh. In those sleepless nights, as the breaths of unspoken words grew louder. Because we are all ready in the light to taste sweet lies when our hearts are hungry. Then we fall silent, so that the little world remains orderly, dreaming of the happiness of the future to forget that the present has long become the past.
Lead me to where my thoughts are. Listen to the unspoken words skin to skin at my side, for the unsaid speaks at night and its truths are bitter, even as the black wings of the night moths smooth over the surging waves, as jasmine blossoms unfold in slow motion, laying something over our souls that is much older than we are. Then your leather hand closes around my wrist. Insistently. Gently. Just one step. A willing stumble into the familiar darkness. Because you do not shy away from my abysses, reflecting in them, and so I close my eyes, intoxicated by the feeling of dizziness, as we lose the wooden floors beneath our feet, letting ourselves drift in the current 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 at my disposal. But is it just my eternal olfactory desire for dark flowers and rough leather along with my boundless admiration for Patti Smith that ensures this fragrance does not let me go?
From a purely rational-analytical perspective, BD is not particularly complex: A cartload of hallucinogenic jasmine meets the distinctly perceivable medicinal-leathery castoreum from the very beginning, balancing the sultry indolic nature of the flowers with its bitter accents, while increasingly audible civet notes begin to purr. The facets of dark Assam oud, which I perceive as sometimes brittle, sometimes soft, provide a supportive backbone, around which the floral vines entwine ever higher into the night sky, supported by Liquidambra (which, according to my research, should correspond more or less to Styrax), softening the angular animality of the robust leather notes with sweet balsamic warmth.
On his homepage, Antonio Lasheras, who says very few words 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. If I had tested it blind, I would have definitely guessed it was a lost fragrance legend from the 1920s or 30s, but still, BD seems to be so much more. In its dark opulence and abyssal passion, the fragrance transcends mundane categories like time and space. BD hovers between worlds, between times, between souls, and feels incredibly close to me. There is a shocking honesty in the clear language of this fragrance and a physicality that takes no prisoners, which I no longer want to miss, even though I may not always have been equally equipped to handle it all.