Nishane
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Honeydew melon floods forward with an almost watery transparency, immediately sharpened by lemon and bergamot's citric brightness, whilst pink pepper and blue ginger add a prickly, aromatic effervescence. There's an aquatic quality here that feels oddly lush rather than clean, as if the fruit has been submerged in mineral water. The cardamom whispers spice at the edges, but it's the melon's peculiar, almost cucumber-like sweetness that dominates these first minutes.
As the aquatic shimmer recedes, blackcurrant and green apple emerge with a tartness that feels deliberately unripe, their acidity playing beautifully against rose's powdery softness. Patchouli grounds everything with its earthy, slightly chocolatey depth, whilst sage and lavender create an aromatic backbone that keeps the fruit from becoming too saccharine. The whole composition begins to feel rounder, warmer, as cashmere wood starts its migration upwards from the base.
Vanilla and cashmere wood fuse into a creamy, skin-like sweetness that's more soft-focus than overtly gourmand, with sandalwood and cedarwood providing a gentle woody frame. White musk adds a clean diffusion, whilst ambergris lends a subtle salinity that echoes back to those opening aquatic notes. What remains is sweet, undeniably, but it's the sort of sweetness that lives close to the skin—intimate, plush, faintly musky, like scented skin after a long day.
Ani X reads like Cécile Zarokian's love letter to the original Ani's gourmand architecture, here rebuilt with a luminous, aqueous framework that shouldn't work but absolutely does. The opening is a riot of contradictions: honeydew melon and aquatic notes create this translucent, almost marine sweetness that immediately collides with pink pepper's fizzy bite and the sharp aromatic snap of blue ginger. It's the sort of composition that keeps you guessing—just when you think you're smelling a fresh aquatic, that cashmere wood and vanilla base begins its slow crawl upwards, dragging everything into a creamy, skin-like sweetness that feels both modern and strangely intimate.
What makes this compelling is how Zarokian handles the fruit. The blackcurrant and green apple in the heart don't read as typically jammy or candied; instead, they're almost tart, slightly underripe, cutting through the melon's saccharine tendencies with something sharper. Patchouli adds a subtle earthiness that prevents this from tipping into full dessert territory, whilst the lavender—barely perceptible—lends an almost fougère-like structure beneath all that fruit and cream. By the time the vanilla and ambergris assert themselves, you're left with something that sits between a gourmand and a woody floriental, sweet but never cloying, fresh but decidedly plush.
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3.6/5 (116)