.

Post by Portia

.

Heya APJ,

So I have had this decant rattling around my sample box. It’s hand written and has the First In Fragrance unicorn sticker, plus the date 05/16 so I’m thinking May this year. Really, I don’t know how it got to be there as I haven’t ordered from this wonderful people this year at all (OOOPS! Sorry guys). It is a mystery. If someone remembers why I have it could they enlighten me please?

LIGHTBULB!! TinaG, is this from you? WOW! Thank you.

Stercus by Orto Parisi 2014

Stercus by Alessandro Guiltier

Fragrantica

Well it opens sweet and balmy. Coffee, urine, woods, birch, honey and balmy resins are my guesses. It’s a pretty aggressive introduction to Stercus and has the smell of animals and urine soaked hay after a flatulent night in the barn. I smell something that I’ve smelled before with Roxana from Illuminated Perfumes when we were composing a Feral Feet accord back in 2013. Well, I say we but it was her composition with Tom Pease and I egging her on to greater heights of outrageous.

Is this a natural perfume? It has a bit of that feel too, the dark, dank, murkiness that makes many of them so enveloping and deep. Labdanum and an oudh-ish barnyard seem to be the heart that still maintains a honeyed sweetness, the feral bits not the pretty modern sweet kind. Is it tobacco? Could be but honestly I am pretty lost. Why don’t we talk more about how Stercus makes me feel?

PDI

Stercus feels cold, alone and windswept. Imagine you are caught out in a very large and wooded park at dusk after a cool sunny autumn day. Now you’ve stayed too long feeding the ducks, the light is dwindling, the wind now has no sunlight to cut its icy blast and you are not dressed for the change. The leaves have fallen from many of the trees and they are stuck wetly to each other. As you walk briskly over them you disturb the smell of their decomposition and close by there is the smell of possums, or maybe it’s a fruit bat roost. That is how Stercus affects me, there is my vision.

Eight hours later and I’m still surrounded by a soft fog of Stercus. It’s green, sweet and funky. Still has the call of wilderness stamped upon it. Beautiful.

Flickr

Further reading: Scented Hound
First In Fragrance have €138/50ml
Surrender To Chance have samples starting at $7.80/ml

Do you like your fragrances just a little feral? Which one do you love?
Portia xx