Newsletter #2: Bianco Latte and Blackbird

On the sniff list for 2025, Bianco Latte, Blackbird

It's high summer in Australia. Our week started off brutally hot before tumbling into a barrage of rain and has levelled out into a pleasant, if windy, weekend. I'm not one to typically take cues from the weather when it comes to perfume selections but the cold, windy midweek did have me reaching for Ambre Loup, the cosiest clove and sandalwood amber in my collection. Revisiting a perfume you haven't worn in a while is like rereading a favourite book - both carry the warmth of catching up with old friends.

The first two weeks of January for any community centered on art and consumerism is anticipatory. Though my ethos is to smell everything - your nose knows what you like whereas your brain is prone to bias - I wanted to talk about some 2025 releases I'm particularly keen to sniff.

Designer and niche houses are more likely to announce new scents ahead of time but of the small houses, my most anticipated release has to be Eris Parfums’ new fragrance. I have a house overview article brewing for this brand because they have so much to say about art and the changing face of the perfume industry. On top of that, the perfumes are damn good. Eris is difficult to source in Australia but I’ll work hard to get my hands on a sample.

One sort of feels like a rubbernecker when following the tenure of Francis Kurkdjian as in-house perfumer at Dior. If there's one thing on earth you could never get me to do it's reformulate Dior Homme Parfum, one of the most beloved scents in the community, but nevertheless he has done it and so on the list it goes.

Also on the list is Bois Talisman, not out of any particular interest (though I have a lot of love for Dior, I find the Privée line uninspiring) but more to smell it and shake my head at what time, and LVMH, have done to one of the great houses of perfume.

Though I liked Dolce&Gabbana’s Devotion, the new Devotion pour Homme seems so obviously a crib on perfumer Olivier Cresp’s Awake from his brand Akro (D&G has basically become Cresp’s side hustle) that there may be little point seeking it out. I have never smelled a good coffee note in any perfume, including Awake, and don’t expect this one to change my mind.

More encouragingly, Delphine Jelk continues to inject new life into Guerlain (though their prices are laughably overblown). I loved Tobacco Honey and thought Néroli Plein Sud was masterfully done, so I’m keen to smell the new Pêche Mirage. It’s also the centennial of the grand dame that is Shalimar. I’m hoping the brand will do something really special - the Millésime flankers are good but haven’t quite brushed up against greatness.

If 2024 is any indicator, this will be another year of constant releases. I’m in no rush to keep up as I’m still working through with last year’s sniff list: I'm keen to explore the brands Puente, d’Annam, and Kajal, and need to get my nose on the rest of the Art and Olfaction Award nominees. I've also got to make a journey down to Sydney to smell the revived Caron line and Arquiste's Almond Suede, which keeps getting rave reviews from people I trust.

I'm never overwhelmed by how much I've got to smell - in fact, it comforts me to know that there's so much out there to discover. May the well of interesting scents never run dry - I hope to pass away at 110, in my sleep, with a smile on my face and one last perfume sample in my drawer.

M

Bianco Latte

House: Giardini di Toscana Perfumer: Silvia Martinelli (in house) Year: 2024

There’s something life affirming about an unexpected superstar coming to the stage in the world of fragrance. For all the billboard posters, influencer sponcon, and bizarre perfume ads in the world, sometimes we the people decide that instead we’re all going to become obsessed with a $250 perfume from an Italian house that opened its doors about five minutes ago.

The name of the people’s princess is Bianco Latte.

Bianco Latte means ‘milky white’, and it’s the figurehead on a ship of new wave gourmands that combine the genre’s classic sugary ethyl maltol note with accords that are creamy and lactonic. Its meteoric rise is tied to #PerfumeTok, the medium which launched it to superstardom, which means that Bianco Latte gets love and hate in equal measure.

I am not a gourmand fanatic, but the rapid rise of Bianco Latte from such a new house interested me. Social media has been such a huge engine for change in the perfume community. Landmark perfumes are no longer the ones with giant ad campaigns, but often gain velocity through influencers and word of mouth - this is a trend we saw with Santal 33 (Le Labo, 2011) and Baccarat Rouge 540 (Maison Francis Kurkdjian, 2015), and now Bianco Latte has joined the party.

It’s not surprising to me that the first huge Tiktok driven perfume is a vanilla. There’s something about this note that draws fanaticism like almost nothing else in perfumery - the people long for the patisserie. Like any perfume note, I think there's a lot of nuance to explore in vanilla but unfortunately this almost never happens, as vanilla is automatically paired with a sugar note and put on the gourmand shelf.

Bianco Latte is not the first pure vanilla perfume from a niche brand to gain a following. There’s a clear and direct connection between Bianco Latte and Tihota (Indult, 2006), which has always been similarly spoken of as a kind of vanillic holy grail.

And Tihota sure is a vanilla - vanilla, sugar, musk and pretty much nothing else. I suppose making a vanilla perfume means a guaranteed sell, because perfumers seem to think that this is the genre in which to phone it in - there’s just so little creativity or exploration to be found in this genre.

It was my hope, spraying Bianco Latte, that it would be something more interesting than the linear Tihota gave us.

You can’t analyse a vanilla perfume the way you would a traditional structure like a chypre or an amber. Vanillas are less about the journey from top notes to drydown and more about balance: vanilla is so strong that it has a half-life of plutonium, so you’ve got the end right at the beginning and the whole thing becomes a matter of exploring depth rather than the breadth.

Bianco Latte’s notes are listed as: caramel, honey, coumarin, vanilla, and white musk. Immediately I begin to suspect the trick to this perfume is in the coumarin, which is the perfumer’s sleight-of-hand in any truly good gourmand scent.

Coumarin is a chemical compound found in tonka beans and has been used in perfume for over a century as a note and a fixative. It’s sweet but not saccharine, and can give an impression of dry hay or a lactonic creaminess, both present in the masterful tonka scent Chergui (Serge Lutens, 2001).

This shifts the lens through which we view Bianco Latte to include reference modern tonka gourmands including Tonka Imperiale (Guerlain, 2010) and Dior’s Fève Délicieuse (Dior, 2015)

I’m a firm believer that a vanilla perfume needs skin to really bloom. When I sprayed Bianco Latte on a blotter, it smelled thin and one dimensional, almost saccharine - not the best of first impressions. But when I sprayed it on my arm, the scent immediately clicks.

On first smell I can immediately see the connection between this scent and Pink Sugar (Aquolina, 2004). That’s not a pejorative - I own a bottle of Pink Sugar and think it’s an incredible perfume, so good that the majority of vanilla gourmands that have come after it struggle to compare. Considering it is so good and also affordable, it is the benchmark vanilla for me. The genius of Pink Sugar is how it balances its sweet vanilla with licorice, and Bianco Latte uses a similar trick with honey and tonka. Ten minutes in and I can confidently say that this is a well made vanilla perfume.

I’ve often seen reviewers describe Bianco Latte as a “grown up” vanilla. This is because the scent is very, very smart with how it uses its ethyl maltol note - it’s quiet, almost subdued, there as an enhancer for the other notes that have their own inherent sweetness. Thus you don’t get that screechy-sharp sugar note that is characteristic of cheaper gourmands, and the impression that Bianco Latte is a sophisticated vanilla.

Smells can have a shape the same way that they can have a colour. A perfume can be sharp or rugged, sleek or voluptuous - part of what defines a perfume as unique from functional or natural smells is this movement, this body. Vanilla perfumes can be quite sharp, especially at a lower price point, but well made ones always seem to have a roundness. They are things with no sharp edges, like they’ve been buffed to a pleasant smoothness, with a density that makes them opaque.

The body vanillic of Bianco Latte feels like this - like it would be heavy if you held it in your hand, a bowl of ice cream, a perfect batch of maritozzi.

Maritozzi - image source

I get the feeling, unfortunately, that Bianco Latte does indeed have a small dose of vanilla absolute. Vanilla - or more specifically, the pods of the vanilla orchid - has a long, interesting, and controversial history of cultivation. Its use as a material in perfumery is controversial. There seems to me very little justification for using vanilla absolute in any perfume when ethylvanillin and vanillin are comparatively cheap, a million times more ethical to source, and have been used in perfumery for over a century. If synthetic vanilla was good enough for Shalimar, it’s good enough for any modern gourmand.

Bianco Latte probably has a mix of natural and synthetic vanillas, but I find myself hoping that I’m wrong and that it’s all ethyl vanillin. Isn’t it the greater victory, in the end, to use the synthetic stuff and so accurately recreate the natural?

And there are a hefty dose of synthetic white musks in Bianco Latte to make the modern sniffer feel at ease. It’s got to be one of the greatest grifts in the modern world, how functional perfumers added white musks to laundry powder and effectively made an entire population think that this completely synthetic smell is the scent of ‘clean skin’. Bianco Latte can’t let you forget it’s a modern niche, but I understand the presence of the musk here - it adds to that fuzzy, rounded shape of the perfume.

At the end of the drydown, it’s apparent that coumarin is the alpha and omega of Bianco Latte. Any gourmand that I’ve ever found notable has used tonka as its foundation for a creamy drydown. In a composition like this, vanilla and sugar aren’t interesting enough on their own to make a good perfume, and the perfumer is smart enough to know it. In a way, the slug of coumarin here reminds me of the deep drydown of Tobacco Vanille (Tom Ford, 2007), when all the tobacco is gone and you’re left with endless creamy tonka like a bowl of gelato that you can’t ever reach the bottom of.

It doesn’t surprise me that people like Bianco Latte - it’s engineered to be as inoffensive as possible - but its momentum is remarkable. Why this perfume, and why now?

There’s also a lot to be said about the popularity of gourmand scents with women, whose appetite and bodies are so heavily policed. Sweet scents are an indulgence - they are familiar and they are safe. I think that for gourmand lovers who have only smelled body sprays or designer scents, Bianco Latte is the perfect gateway to niche.

Vanilla scents are linear enough and familiar enough to the modern nose that you can smell the difference between the well blended Bianco Latte and something like Eilish (Billie Eilish, 2021) or Bare Vanilla (Victoria’s Secret, 2018). Bianco Latte is a vanilla for people with disposable income.

There’s a thrill about hearing reviews of a perfume that is everything you never knew you wanted and ordering a bottle, like you’re in on a delicious secret. Vanilla, but better. Vanilla, but expensive. The smell of not wanting to smell like everyone else but still wanting to smell like the most popular smell in the world - that’s Bianco Latte.

Like books and films, it’s worthwhile to smell a perfume and ask yourself if it’s still going to be talked about in twenty years. Most perfumes fade into memory and then obscurity, and the ones that are left are usually remembered by the fanatics - and the thing about us fanatics is we like the weird shit. Not because we’ve smelled so much that traditional perfumes become boring, but because scent is a sense that is attuned to danger, to wrongness, and it’s the wrongness that sticks in your brain. A little thread of something disturbing is what takes a good perfume and makes it a great one.

It’s not like there isn’t potential for a little bit of danger in Bianco Latte. If you have cow’s milk in your fridge right now, go and give it a sniff. There’s a creaminess there, of course, and the smell is comforting and familiar because you’ve been smelling it all your life.

But there’s also a funkiness too, something musky and earthy and animalic, because it’s a product that comes from an animal. It’s going to go bad on you eventually; it’s going to turn; it’s always on the precipice of becoming something that will make you sick. It’s all there in the smell, the grass that the cow eats and the musk of its body and the race against time until the milk goes sour. Just because you’re used to the smell doesn’t take away from how strange it really is.

Butter and honey and milk and cream are smells that are just as animalic as civet or hyrax or deer musk or ambergris. A milky perfume should be an animalic perfume. But the challenging, animalic facets of gourmand notes are confronting to the modern nose and so they’re avoided in perfumery. It’s a pity, because they’re the exact thing that would make the perfumes interesting.

Bianco Latte is a pleasant, well made, and inoffensive smell. Its determination to swaddle you in clouds of vanilla and musk will continue to sell bottles for another decade or so, before a new vanilla comes along to topple it from its throne.

From top notes to drydown, Bianco Latte is nothing but milky white. Like a pop album from an artist who will always stay just on the cusp of fame, Bianco Latte is well made and utterly forgettable. ★★☆☆☆

Blackbird

House: Olympic Orchids Perfumer: Ellen Covey (independent), Year: 2013

In an increasingly soulless and cynical perfume landscape, it’s life affirming to know that independent perfumery is having a golden age. Though the beauty of independent perfumery is that you don’t have to be headquartered in the three great perfume centres (Paris, Grasse, and New York) to have a viable business, the heart of the independent perfume movement may just be American.

Over the past twenty years so many incredible American artisans have brought new life to the world of perfume. From Bruno Fazzolari’s FZOTIC to Diane St Clair’s remarkable St Clair Scents, to Terri Bozzo’s sleeper hit brand Kyse Perfumes and Nick Nilsson’s journey from an obsession with coniferous perfumes into creating Pineward and the revival of Apoteker Tepe, these are the kind of success stories you can, and should, feel good about.

Seek these brands out and support independent perfumery - your nose will thank you.

One of the original American independent perfume houses is Olympic Orchids, helmed by Dr Ellen Covey. I find that many of the most talented perfumers stumble into the job from other professions (and indeed sometimes keep their ‘day jobs’).

In Dr Covey’s case, she is a researcher and professor at the University of Washington, a grower of orchids, and also the creator of the strangest, most confronting, most darkly beautiful perfumes you may ever smell. Many of her perfumes are inspired by scents and places in the Pacific Northwest, where she is based.

Covey is probably best known in the perfume world for creating the original formulation of Bat (Zoologist, 2015), a perfume so intensely natural smelling that it gave me a prehistoric fear that I was being hunted through the jungle as soon as I sprayed it.

Her Olympic Orchids perfumes evoke emotions, true emotions, sometimes ugly ones - the intensely sharp greenery of Chevalier Vert made me feel like there was some kind of Annihilation-esque vegetal monstrosity trying to claw its way out of my throat, and I had to throw the blotter in my outside bin; the warm, dusty incense of Dev #2: The Main Act made me think of the sunlight back room of my grandmother’s house when I was a child, and I was struck with a bittersweet nostalgia for the illusion of simplicity you have during childhood for as long as I wore it.

These are not easy perfumes to smell or to wear, and to Covey’s credit I don’t think that they’re meant to be. There’s an olfactory thickness to these scents, most likely from a good dose of natural materials that are embraced for their complexity rather than punished for it. Life is complicated; scents are complicated; in smelling Olympic Orchids perfumes you begin to realise how curated and restrictive mainstream scents are - they think you can’t handle the complexity, but I promise you that you can, and there’s a sense of victory once you unravel the Gordian Knot of one of these perfumes and get to say I understand, I understand now.

The Olympic Orchids perfume I return to most often is Blackbird. This is a blackberry and fir balsam perfume of stunning beauty, so natural smelling it will transport you to the middle of the forest on even the hottest summer day.

Its notes are listed as: Himalayan blackberry fruit, dry grass and leaves, elemi, cedar wood and resin, woody-amber accord, fir balsam absolute, musk.

There’s nothing quite like the thrill of pulling out a perfume sample that has a deep, rich, inky colour. Blackbird is the exact berry-purple that you want it to be. When designer houses dye their perfumes blue or pink, that’s a red flag, but with indie houses there would be no point in cosmetically dying the formula so if there’s a dark colour, it’s all from the materials. Seeing a perfume with a colour like that is like Christmas morning.

The amethyst coloured Blackbird is in one of those little dabber bottles that are the bane of every perfume lover’s existence. The one upside to these little devils is that the juice sometimes get caught around the lid and the scent will waft out before you open it, like a little prelude to the main show. It will get on your fingers; you will smell it all day; there is no choice but to embrace this.

Once I finish fighting with the dabber and get the scent on my skin, Blackbird immediately whacks me in the face with an intense, tart, near bitter blackberry note.

There’s an understandable hesitance from a lot of fragrance obsessives when it comes to fruit notes, because they’ve spent twenty years languishing as the top notes in every synthetic sugar-patchouli Angel derivative that’s flooded the designer market. Blackbird is the tonic that you need - the blackberry note in this perfume is so realistic that you feel as if you’re standing in front of a blackberry bush just on the cusp of autumn. The fruit is present, and indeed dominant, across the entire perfume, but it’s not at all sweet. This perfume is proof that every accord that you think you hate in modern perfumery is being revolutionised by an independent perfumer somewhere, if you can hunt them down.

As the perfume settles on your skin and your nose starts to investigate, it becomes clear that Dr Covey has almost created a blackberry soliflore in this perfume. It’s as if she has set out to recreate the exact scent of a blackberry bush in its natural setting: the forest floor, the foliage of the plant, the fruit, even the fragrant air and trees around it is present in this perfume. A lot of the heavy lifting is being done by a truly beautiful fir balsam accord and there’s a dry, grassy note of hay in the base too.

I know what you’re thinking: tart, nearly bitter blackberry and squeaky-sharp cleaning product pine? Yes, there is a medicinal touch to Blackbird. If you take a deep enough sniff of this perfume, there’s the taste of a blackberry lozenge in the back of your throat, and you can even feel a little bit of that fever-hot menthol like you’re dissolving a Strepsil on your tongue. A win on the board for my people, the cough syrup loving weirdos of the world. But there is only a touch of this feeling, because the perfume smells incredibly natural and lived in.

Blackberries are meant to picked in late summer, just before the weather turns, and there’s a feeling of seasons ending in this perfume. The tart juiciness of the blackberry contrasting with the nearly herbal dryness of the hay note are rounded out by a not-quite-amber stickiness from the elemi resin. You can’t help but feel like you’re taking a late summer walk in the trees when you smell Blackbird - it is so deeply evocative.

The closest I’ve been to Dr Covey’s corner of the world is Muir Woods, the redwood park just outside of San Francisco. It’s a place I think of often because it’s probably the most meditative and peaceful I have ever felt in my life, walking through the trees. I’m the kind of person who feels comforted, not smothered, by a canopy of foliage above me; I’m soothed by the thought that my life and all my problems don’t really matter in the face of so much nature, so much time.

I thought I would find those woods and that feeling in Blackbird, but surprisingly I didn’t - there’s no mossiness or dampness in the scent, no feeling of early morning dew. Instead Blackbird takes me to a primordial forest, a forest so hyperreal it’s like a primitive memory, the kind of places that grew wild when wolves still roamed in England and the bison ruled the Great Plains and there was still some mystery in the world to be uncovered.

It’s the forest of fairy tales that lives in Blackbird, a witch wood, tart and sweet to lure you in but holding that thread of danger underneath, like you’re out foraging and see a curl of smoke from a chimney up ahead and you walk towards it, not knowing that it’s Baba Yaga in her hut on chicken’s feet just around the corner.

The scent, in summary, is witchy as hell.

Vasilisa at the Hut of Baba Yaga (Ivan Bilibin)

The magic of Blackbird is that it can evoke so clearly a place that I have never been and yet a place I’ve been visiting all my life, since I read my first fairy tale. This perfume is like a folk memory that draws deep from the bone. I love it, but it’s not an easy thing to smell or to wear. The deep emotion of it clings to the back of your throat and lives in the black that seems imprinted with light when you really try to look after you close your eyes.

And don’t be mistaken - Blackbird is a commitment. Even the smallest dab of an Olympic Orchids perfume is going to project and last all day on your skin. They will stain your clothes if your sleeve gets too close. They will fill the room if you leave a blotter unattended. The feeling of all Olympic Orchid perfumes for the modern urban and suburban dweller is akin to when people comfortable with buying food pre-packaged from a supermarket go to a farm and see how produce is actually made. You know this, vaguely; you understand the concept in the back of your mind; but seeing and smelling it in person is another thing entirely.

The presence of these perfumes demand attention, and attention you will give - you are helpless in the face of the nature. You are helpless at the altar of these perfumes.

You should smell Blackbird. You should smell all of Dr Covey’s perfumes - you need to smell these perfumes. They will reveal things about yourself you didn’t know that you knew.

And maybe what you need, when you’re sitting in the office in the middle of the day, is to smell your wrist and feel like you’re in the middle of a forest, with home far behind and the witch’s cottage waiting in the dark green right in front you. ★★★★☆ ■