Top first fifteen minutes
Heart two to four hours
Base until morning
Touch a note. Watch the air change.
I The hour
At ten past dusk the streetlamps are lit but the sky has not agreed to leave. The garden exhales. Bergamot, still cold from the knife; neroli, white as a held breath; and under everything, cedar and musk, warm as a coat someone left on the back of a chair.
One long August, the windows open, forty-one drafts. We kept the one that smelled like the moment you stop noticing you are wearing anything at all.
II The pyramid
A perfume is not a sentence. It is a sunset — it changes as it goes. Touch any note and the whole hour leans toward it.
Top notes first fifteen minutes
Sicilian peel, cold from the knife. Pink pepper cracked over it like a dry, bright laugh in the next room.
Heart notes two to four hours
Orange blossom, honeyed at the edges and green at the stem; night-blooming jasmine, creamy and a little indecent.
Base notes until the next morning
Pencil shavings and a shelf in the sun; white musk like laundered linen, the quiet after everyone has left.
III In their words
“I opened the box on a rainy train platform and for one whole minute it was Sicily. Two strangers looked up from their phones.”
“It never announces itself. It lingers on a scarf for three days like a rumour you were glad to hear.”
“The neroli is so white it feels cold. Then the cedar comes in and suddenly you are wearing something soft. The bottle is a small cathedral.”
IV Discovery set
Five 2 mL vials, N°1 through N°5, in a linen box that smells faintly of the workshop. Redeemable against a full bottle, whenever the hour is right.
Ships in linen. Arrives smelling faintly of oranges.