J.F. Schwarzlose Berlin
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Red pepper detonates immediately—not the bright, cheerful heat of pink pepper, but something rawer and more aggressive that makes your nose prickle. The sandalwood appears almost simultaneously, but it's singed at the edges, as though the pepper has literally burned through its creaminess, leaving a disconcerting mix of comfort and alarm.
Patchouli emerges damp and earthy, anchoring the composition whilst the vanilla begins its slow crawl upward, but the cypriol ensures nothing gets too cosy—there's a diesel-smoke quality here that makes the sweetness feel almost furtive. The whole heart phase oscillates between "I want to eat this" and "I should probably leave," creating that intoxicated confusion the name promises.
Hours later, it's a resinous blur of amber and oud with vanilla threading through like sweetness remembered rather than experienced, whilst the smoke never entirely dissipates. What remains is warm but strange, a scent memory that feels slightly distorted, as though you're recalling last night through a pleasant fog.
Rausch—German for "intoxication"—lives up to its name through a disorienting collision of red pepper heat and sandalwood cream that shouldn't work but absolutely does. Véronique Nyberg has crafted something deliberately destabilising here: the opening pepper doesn't merely sit atop the composition but seems to cauterise the sandalwood, creating a seared, almost scorched quality that borders on uncomfortable. This is sweetness through a haze of smoke, where patchouli's earthy darkness tangles with vanilla's comfort in a way that feels more narcotic than gourmand. The cypriol adds a woody, almost petrol-like edge that prevents the vanilla-amber pairing from sliding into conventional warmth, whilst the oud lurks in the base as a threatening undertone rather than a showpiece.
This is fragrance as altered state—spicy, yes, but with an almost feverish quality that suggests nightfall in a city you don't quite recognise. It's for those who find conventional "spicy orientals" too polite, too resolved. The type who wear heavy scent to underground clubs where the air is thick with bodies and ambition, or who simply enjoy the cognitive dissonance of smelling both edible and vaguely dangerous. Rausch doesn't seduce in any traditional sense; it unsettles, then compels. The sweetness is always there, but it's refracted through so much smoke and spice that you're never quite sure if you're being embraced or immolated.
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4.0/5 (189)