Black Ship Grooming Co.
Black Ship Grooming Co.
737 votes
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The mandarin provides a fleeting moment of citrus brightness before tuberose barrels through—full-throttle, creamy-white florals with their characteristic rubber and petrol facets intact. Tobacco leaf adds a dry, slightly bitter counterpoint that keeps this opening from veering into pure florality, creating an unsettling push-pull between fresh fruit, heady flowers, and arid smoke.
Iris and benzoin form a powdery-resinous alliance that softens the tuberose's sharper edges whilst opoponax deepens everything into honeyed, ambery territory. The floralcy persists but becomes more blurred, more abstracted, as if viewed through incense smoke. That mysterious 'must' accord emerges here—a vaguely animalic, skin-like quality that adds intimate warmth and prevents the composition from floating away entirely into sweetness.
Bourbon vanilla dominates, thick and slightly caramelised, threaded through with balsamic resins and a lingering whisper of tobacco. The musk turns this into a second-skin scent, salty-sweet and surprisingly tenacious despite the lack of longevity data. What remains is comforting yet unconventional—less 'vanilla gourmand' and more 'vanilla found in an antique apothecary jar, surrounded by dried flowers and old leather'.
Davy Jones reads like a baroque fever dream—the olfactory equivalent of finding a cigar box filled with tuberose petals in the captain's quarters of a ghost ship. The opening salvo is genuinely odd: bright Calabrian mandarin crashes into waxy, indolic tuberose whilst dry tobacco leaf hovers between them like smoke in still air. It's a collision that shouldn't work, yet the creamy sweetness binding these disparate elements creates something unexpectedly wearable, if deeply unconventional.
The heart reveals Black Ship's true intent. Florentine iris lends its rooty, carrot-like facets to benzoin's vanilla-resinous warmth, whilst opoponax (sweet myrrh) adds honeyed, balsamic depth that amplifies the tuberose's narcotic qualities. This isn't the clean, modern iris of contemporary fragrances—it's the dusty, lipstick-powdery iris of vintage perfumery, streaked with tobacco and anchored by must. That listed 'must' accord is crucial; it provides an animalic, slightly funky undertone that prevents all this sweetness from becoming cloying.
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3.7/5 (86)