Like any good tasting, we suggest smelling these fragrances in the following order as they increase in intensity and tenacity.
Start with Moth, a haunting and gothic fragrance that blurs sweetness with smoke until its dividing line disappears altogether. In this sense, it keeps itself at a distance - this alluring fire is a danger that is impossible to touch. It is a warmth that both repels and allures. A perfume like this might seem unusual for some - but this oscillation is the very basis of its appeal. Many dry and warm spices are glossed in smoky and dark honey, merging into many contrasting folds of palo santo, vetiver, incense and even velvety florals. Moth holds all of these notes together, and is full of mystery and darkness. Bat equally demonstrates a gothic theme - its cold and minerally cavern faintly illuminated and glistening in moonlight. It is an experience that challenges us with its almost brutal realism: a nocturnal seance that incarnates an eerie aura. In this twilight light, fruit notes gain a mysterious character – they are intensified and irreal and cold to the touch. Fig, passionfruit, and guava become strange to themselves, retaining their potency and characteristic sharpness. Bat is its own world, and this fragrance allows us to enter it!
Sloth more clearly makes the familiar strange. Its central lavender note, aptly sleepy and languorous, soft, spicy, and fresh, is supersaturated with the scent of the earth. It is bewitched and dream-like, as gentle buds and blossoms are disturbed with sharp peaks of acai berry, animalic cumin seed, and pungently green and ozonic violet leaf. Sloth never forgets the fact of its animal nature - waves of funk and musk work the scent: a mushroom note keeps the creature connected to the rainforest, offset with the faint bitterness of myrrh. It respects the organic state of nature - it sees pleasure in strange funkiness. Sacred Scarab is close to the soil, tunnelling underground as it buries a treasure made of dung. Its referent is unmistakably the world of Ancient Egypt, with its near-mythical practices: this perfume works with an otherworldly intensity started off with fascinating lashes of resinous incense. It is moody, its feeling strange and primaeval, out from these folds of incense emerge floral and fruity sweetness, modulated with aldehydes and animalic notes. Sacred Scarab is a rare work that marvellously fits its theme, but it is one that seldom gets studied.
Hyrax takes a different approach, celebrating the oft neglected hyraceum note. In this composition, it is hot fur in the sweltering sun and heat radiating off scorched rocks. Hyrax is a perfume of thresholds: working with an animalic accord also consisting of civet and castoreum. This is Zoologist’s most animalic fragrance to date, and an initially ferocious energy fades to reveal layers of Turkish rose, pepper, and spices. Its rareness produces strangeness, and its intensity lasts, and lasts, and lasts. Finally, a whiff of Tyrannosaurus Rex evokes the first half of the etymology of dinosaur: deinos ‘terrible’, that is, ‘extremely serious’. Equally, the dinosaur represents the fantastical and the enormous, and Zoologist’s T-Rex offers no apologies, just smell. It is to be praised for its unapologetic appearance, and it gives this creature its due - with a power we can only imagine. It elaborates upon an intensely smoky theme. Yet, make it through this and T-Rex surprises with its elegant shape: layers of smoke, musks, and searingly hot spices.
