Scentzilla!

Cincinnatus, who seemed pitch-black to them, as though he had been cut out of a cord-size block of night, opaque Cincinnatus would turn this way and that, trying to catch the rays, trying with desperate haste to stand in such a way as to seem translucent. Those around him understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or a catapult with wondrous consequences. In the dusty little museum on Second Boulevard, where they used to take him as a child, and where he himself would later take his charges, there was a collection of rare, marvelous objects, but all the townsmen except Cincinnatus found them just as limited and transparent as they did each other.

Vladimir Nabokov in Invitation to a Beheading

I dug up an old email I had sent, in which I described Alberto Absolu thusly: “…it takes such curious little turns. It’s sex and chocolate, a library filled with leather bound editions, good olive oil, warm cookies from the oven, a walk through a garden, and a very tiny petting zoo, all distilled into the crazy farmer’s market of its aroma.” This is wordy, and yet inadequate. The fragrance is an upsilamba. And all its wonderous consequences have left me scratching my head for another way to describe it than as precisely that. I give up. Quite simply, it is perfumer Alberto Morillas’ upsilamba.

Alberto Absolu was a perfume self-portrait composed by Morillas as part of Sacré Nobi’s /7S/ Olfactory Installation along with his Seven Deadly Sins. You can also read more about it at Chandler Burr’s website. Alas, it is currently unavailable, but I’m secretly hoping perhaps I can stir a wee bit of interest in it, so that it might be sold sooner rather than later.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 13th, 2006 at 5:56 am and is filed under Perfume Reviews, S-Perfume. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.