Vespro
Frankincense, orris, labdanum
- Composed by
- Ariane Cazal
- Family
- Amber
- Formula written
- 2019
- From
- €85.00
Vespro
Frankincense, orris, labdanum
How it was built
Vespro was built backwards, from the resin up. The brief was a single question: what does a stone church smell like an hour after the candles are out, when the smoke has settled into the plaster and the cold has come back into the floor.
The answer turned out to be less about incense than about what sits underneath it. Somalian frankincense gives the top of the heart its dry, lemon-rind lift, but the body of the fragrance is labdanum absolute -- a dark, leathery, faintly salty resin combed from the fleece of goats grazing cistus scrub. Orris butter, at a concentration that is uncomfortable to write on an invoice, keeps the two from collapsing into sweetness.
It wears close for the first twenty minutes and then opens outward as the benzoin warms. On skin it lasts an unreasonable amount of time. On wool it lasts longer.
How it wears
Four properties, read on skin over a full day rather than on a blotter. They describe behaviour, not preference.
Sillage
An arm's length
Longevity
Into the next day
Temperature
Warm and resinous
Density
Fully stacked
These are the atelier’s own readings, taken on skin rather than on a blotter, and they describe how the fragrance behaves rather than how much anyone liked it.
Head, heart and base
The materials that determine each stage, in the order they own it. The bars are compositional weight within a tier, not a percentage of the formula; the formula itself is not published.
Head
The most volatile materials. They are what you smell as the alcohol flashes off, and they are gone inside twenty minutes.
Bergamot, CalabriaCitrus bergamia
Pink pepperSchinus molle
ElemiCanarium luzonicum
Heart
The body of the composition. It emerges as the head clears and holds for two to four hours; this is the fragrance as it is meant to be recognised.
FrankincenseBoswellia carterii
Orris butterIris pallida
Immortelle absoluteHelichrysum italicum
Base
The least volatile materials, and the ones that fix the rest in place. What is left on skin at the end of the day, and on cloth for days after.
Labdanum absoluteCistus ladanifer
Benzoin SiamStyrax tonkinensis
Ambrette seedAbelmoschus moschatus
Materials and provenance
Where the principal materials come from and how they are won from the plant. Every lot behind a given bottle is recorded against its flacon code.
FrankincenseBoswellia carterii
Sanaag, Somaliland
Steam distillation of hand-tapped tears, second grade
We buy the second tapping rather than the first. The resin runs cleaner later in the season and the oil carries less of the turpentine edge that makes cheap incense smell like paint.
Labdanum absoluteCistus ladanifer
Sierra de Andújar, Andalusia
Alcohol washing of the crude gum, then absolute
Cistus grows on ground too poor for anything else. The gum is collected from the plant in high summer, when the leaves are tacky enough to hold it.
Orris butterIris pallida
Chianti, Tuscany
Three-year rhizome cure, then steam distillation
The rhizome is dug, peeled and dried for three years before it is worth distilling. Nothing about orris is fast, and its price reflects the calendar rather than the labour.
Size and price
Each size is filled from the same batch. The ten millilitre format is not a sample; it is the same juice in a smaller flacon.
€85.00
10 ml eau de parfum · reference NOC-VSP-010
Bottles are filled to order from the current batch and dispatched within five working days. Fragrance cannot be returned once the seal is broken; an unopened flacon may be returned within fourteen days.