When I began trying to recreate Queen of Dreams from Savage Gourmand and Lycoctonum from Killer Sillage for an upcoming book fair, I was convinced the pastry fragrance would be the difficult one. I was wrong.
Unlike Queen of Dreams, which had to evoke a very specific real-world smell, Lycoctonum wasn't based on any existing perfume. I had invented it. I wanted it to smell like dark roses, damp green things, leather, and shadows. Elegant, maybe a little dangerous. Surely, I thought, someone in the niche fragrance world must have already created something close? After all, perfumers have been making dark rose chypres for decades.
How hard could it be to find something already existing that I could alter a tad?
Reader, it turns out I am incredibly picky. The search quickly became less about finding one perfect perfume and more about assembling a cast of supporting actors. Every day my desk disappeared beneath a fresh crop of blotters. Most days, I found myself muttering things that would have sounded completely unhinged to anyone outside the fragrance or murder mystery-writing communities. "Too pretty." "Not enough leather." "Too much tobacco." "This one isn't poisonous enough." (Seriously, I said that more than once.)
The poor perfumes themselves had done nothing wrong. Some were beautiful. Guerlain's Rose Barbare was richer than I remembered. Serge Lutens' La Fille de Berlin was dramatic but ultimately too elegant. Diptyque's Eau Capitale was wonderful, but far too civilized. Others leaned too fruity, too powdery, or softened into vanilla-adjacent just when I wanted them to remain thorny and cold.
Instead of searching for a single answer, I began layering. A green perfume here. A leather fragrance there. A dark rose on top. Then another dark rose. Then perhaps a different leather. I tried combinations involving Andrea Maack's Coven, Commodity Moss, J-Scent Black Leather, Frapin Nevermore, Matiere Premiere Radical Rose and Falcon Leather, Carine Roitfeld Kar-Wai, Marc-Antoine Barrois Ganymede, Rose Barbare, Bougie Bougees Quir, L'Artisan Arcana Rosa, and more than a few fragrances I've already forgotten.
Some combinations came tantalizingly close. One smelled wonderfully strange, but wasn't rosy enough. Another had exactly the right leather, until the drydown became soft and vanillic. One beautiful blend gradually transformed into expensive soap. (I rather liked that one for myself to wear.) Several became, as I repeatedly informed my increasingly patient husband, "too pretty." That turned out to be the problem. Real perfumes, even unusual ones, generally want to be wearable. They are designed to be beautiful, intriguing, comforting, or seductive. Lycoctonum isn't. It's the signature fragrance named after a poisonous plant (wolfsbane) and containing an accord meant to evoke another poisonous plant. It isn't supposed to smell conventionally attractive. It should make you lean in, admire it... and perhaps wonder whether getting quite that close was a mistake.
Somewhere during this process, I realized I had been chasing something that may not actually exist. I realized I was actually searching for a feeling, not just a fragrance. Fortunately, I didn't need to bottle Lycoctonum, I only need to suggest it. Eventually, I stopped looking for perfection and started looking for character.
After countless experiments, I settled on a blend of Piguet Bandit, Byredo Rose Noir, and Guerlain Rose Barbare, decanted together from tiny 1ml samples into a slightly bigger 5 ml spray bottle. To help it last longer, after spraying this concoction on my blotters, I coated it with a layer of Demeter Dark Rose perfume oil, to make it last longer on the paper. Was it the Lycoctonum I'd imagined while writing Killer Sillage? No. The perfume in my head is darker. Stranger. But nobody else could smell what I perceived in my mind's nose, so there was no need to replicate it exactly. Clearly I wasn't able to do that. What I wanted to do was to make something that was good enough.
It seemed successful enough. Browsers at the book fair sniffed thoughtfully, most saying, "ooh, I like that," though some just declared it "nice." It clearly wasn't anything they had ever smelled before. And perhaps that's all Lycoctonum ever needed to be. Not an exact recreation of the perfume that existed in my imagination. Just something distinctive enough that, after reading the novel, a reader might think: "Yes. I can imagine Guillermo Flares creating this."
-----------------------Posted by theminx on Minxstinks
Note: this post is my opinion. I am not affiliated with the companies mentioned in this post or any other companies.
