Naomi Goodsir
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The first spray is a slap of bitter green—galbanum and angelica root creating an almost pharmaceutical sharpness that prickles in the nose. Saffron adds an odd, heated quality, like touching warm Bakelite, whilst everything tilts towards something medicinal and vaguely industrial rather than traditionally perfumed.
Here comes the tuberose, but filtered through smoke and davana's strange, jammy-medicinal sweetness. The ylang contributes an oily, almost petrol-like floralcy that merges with the woody-tarry elements beginning to rise from below, creating this extraordinary green-black floral that smells simultaneously botanical and synthetic, living and manufactured.
Birch tar and cade dominate now, all smoky leather and forest fire, whilst the labdanum and styrax create a resinous, almost melted-plastic base. The musk adds a skin-like warmth that prevents this from becoming completely abstract, grounding the burnt, woody florals into something recognisably human—if that human happens to smell like they've been arranging flowers in a tyre factory.
Nuit de Bakélite is a study in contradictions—a green-black fragrance that smells of crushed stems meeting hot rubber, botanical intensity colliding with industrial smoke. Isabelle Doyen has orchestrated something genuinely unsettling here: the sharp, almost medicinal bitterness of angelica and galbanum slice through the opening like scissors through raw silk, whilst saffron adds a metallic, heated quality that suggests machinery rather than spice cupboards. This isn't the creamy, indolic tuberose you know; instead, the Indian variety arrives twisted through davana's rum-like weirdness and ylang's petrol-tinged sweetness, creating a floral heart that smells green-black rather than white.
The real genius lies in Doyen's use of birch tar and cade—materials that reek of forest fires and tyre factories—to frame these flowers in shadow. The labdanum and styrax add a resinous, almost burnt-plastic quality that fully justifies the Bakelite reference; this is perfumery for those who find vintage telephones more alluring than rose gardens. It's aggressively vegetal, unapologetically bitter, and wears like a leather jacket lined with crushed flower heads.
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3.6/5 (106)