Zoologist
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Frankincense erupts with startling coldness, its smoke filtered through brine rather than cathedral air, whilst salicylate delivers a sharp, almost pharmaceutical punch that makes your nose recoil before leaning back in with fascination. Pink pepper fizzes at the periphery, adding a prickly effervescence to what feels like incense drowned in seawater and brought back to smouldering, half-life.
The ink accord blooms with genuine strangeness—not metaphorical but literal, recalling the mineral tang of fountain pen ink mixed with the mucilaginous darkness of cephalopod secretions. Salt intensifies everything, working with opoponax's earthy-sweet resinousness to create something that smells simultaneously ancient and alien, like recovering parchment from a shipwreck or discovering prehistoric fossils in tidal caves.
Benzoin's vanilla-adjacent warmth finally offers comfort, though it remains ghosted by ambergris's marine whisper and musk's persistent salinity. The smoke has dissipated into a skin scent that's part shoreline, part incense burner, leaving behind the impression of warmth sought and found in fundamentally cold, inhospitable depths.
Zoologist's Squid is a marvel of olfactory dissonance, capturing the alien intelligence of cephalopods through a collision of saline minerality and ecclesiastical incense. Céline Barel has conjured something genuinely unsettling here: the opening frankincense doesn't read as devotional but rather submarine, its resinous tendrils swirling through cold, pressurised water. That salicylate—listed brazenly in the notes—brings a medicinal, almost iodine-like sharpness that recalls both antiseptic and ocean spray, whilst pink pepper crackles at the edges like static electricity through deep water.
The true genius reveals itself in the heart, where drawing ink creates an inky, sepia-toned darkness that feels genuinely abyssal. This isn't the friendly aquatic of marine colognes; it's the olfactory equivalent of staring into a tidal pool at midnight, all briny opacity and shadows. The opoponax adds a strange, almost fermented sweetness that mingles with those salty notes to evoke both desiccated seaweed and ancient maritime wood.
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4.0/5 (116)