Zoologist Perfumes sent me a sample of Tyrannosaurus Rex in their customary exquisite packaging, with a picture of the capo di tutti i capi on the label wearing a Fedora, a chalk stripe suit and a raincoat. I sprayed it on skin and was completely baffled. It smelled like an object not of this earth. A dream movie trailer came to mind: a car speeds along a straight, dusty track under an empty sky to a GPS spot in a flat scrub desert, to meet up with a team carefully picking through charred remains strewn on the ground. On arrival, the woman in charge walks up to me and hands me a small, irregular black object, hard to the touch and abnormally light. I bring it to my nose: T.Rex. This thing is to the currently fashionable empyreumatic niche fragrances (smoke, incense, creosote) what cars that have been squeezed into a small cube by sculptor César Baldaccini are to a family saloon. Like them, T.Rex. is a compression, an object of mangled, impenetrable structure, with no air left inside and no discernible top and bottom. It is probably the most laconic fragrance ever devised. Knowing that it had been composed by the erudite and articulate architect-perfumer Antonio Gardoni, I emailed him a one-liner, “please explain”. And he did: he wanted to use a lot of patchouli without anyone noticing, so he added equal amounts of other materials, among which cade wood and a lustrous, metallic rose material until —to my mind— he achieved a sort of anthracite, i.e. what happens to vegetal matter when subjected to enormous pressures and temperatures. This, then, is not so much the smell of T Rex as that of the asteroid that whacked him. LT
Sample kindly sent by Zoologist
This review will be included in the next edition. Click here for the 2018 guide.