Where Even Beast Mode Fears to Tread

Newsletter #16: Zoologist T-Rex, the door to hell

In a pit in Turkmenistan there is a fire that's been burning for forty years.

The Darvaza pit is a natural gas crater about four hours drive from Ashgabat. Turkmenistan is one of those post-Soviet Central Asian countries that is always dealing with authoritarianism on some level, and a few years ago its president officially named the crater The Shining of Karakum. But it is more commonly known as The Door to Hell.

I think about this pit every so often. It’s a natural gas field that has a pleasing amount of mystery around its origins - some say that the Soviets drilled too deep and accidentally set ablaze; others that the pit was purposefully lit to prevent exposure to poisonous gas. It’s not the only forever fire in the world but it's perhaps the most cinematic, a seam of flame that appears out of nowhere in the middle of a desertscape, Dante Alighieri meets Dune.

People who have descended to the bottom of the crater describe it as feeling like being surrounded by ‘a colosseum of fire’. In a world that has volcanoes and wildfires and hotsprings, I don’t know why this giant fiery pit in the desert is so compelling. But someone lit it on fire forty years ago and it’s never stopped burning, and I think about that.

I think about The Door to Hell. I think about what it would smell like.

People who have visited Darvaza - and it is the main tourist attraction in the country - say that there is no smoke in the air, that the fire burns clean. But it is hard to interpret the scent of fire without thinking of those acrid, smoky notes so common to the world of hot barbecue perfumery.

The genre of hot coal, creosote, boiling lava and dirty ash perfume is one of the most challenging is the entire olfactory world. Smell is a sense that has evolved in humanity for thousands of years to lead us to food and away from danger, and a fire perfume dances across both of these nerves. Is it the smell of dinner, or death, or both? A smoky perfume is talking directly to the animal in you. That’s why the people who would rather the beast is left alone turn shy at that first acrid, smoky sniff.

For everybody else there are burning pits in Turkmenistan and an entire genre of perfumery that explores the human relationship with fire. As with any theme in perfumery there is brilliance and drudgery in smoky perfumes, but today we’re going to talk about a pretty good one.

Well, I say good. The discretion is left to the sniffer, and if you’re not someone who likes a smoky perfume you probably won’t like it regardless. My personal taste and interpretation of perfume and the tastes of the average smeller have never been in such stark contrast as when I first sprayed a test blotter of T-Rex (Zoologist, 2018).

Picture the scene: it’s 2020, the period of deep lockdown when supermarkets were rationing toilet paper, and I was ordering perfume samples like a drip feed IV to stay sane.

My preference for smelling new things is to spray them in store (mainly because it is free), but lockdown gave me some of the only circumstances in which I could justify pretty frequent sample orders. After smelling new deliveries in my makeshift room-office multiple times I would perambulate around my house and shove blotters or my wrist under my family’s noses, asking eagerly for their thoughts.

My family love perfume but their tastes lean towards ‘the normal stuff, Miccaeli, and not your weird shit.’ The designer counter is familiar territory for them, but anything more confronting than a Westernised oud is a strong no. At first they sniffed with interest. But the longer COVID went the more experimental and artistic the samples got, and soon I was meant with grimaces and sighs at the sight of my hated blotters.

I was pushing it with the great Patchouli 24 allergic reaction over a game of Scrabble (still mentioned with a shudder when we play board games), but the very limit was reached when I sprayed a sample of T-Rex.

Tyrannosaurus Rex is a Zoologist scent created by Antonio Gardoni, one of the great modern artisan perfumers. An architect by trade, he is the nose behind Bogue Parfumo, one of the few modern houses one can safely say does not have a bad perfume in its lineup. Gardoni’s style is operatic, perfumery on a scale not smelled since the mid-century greats. To give such a perfumer the brief to recreate the scent of a Jurassic world is surely one of Victor Wong’s most obvious turns of genius.

And Gardoni throws it all at T-Rex. The best way I can describe the perfume is that it smells like the world of the dinosaurs about five minutes after the meteor hit: death, destruction, world-ending fire.

A lot of perfumes are the smell of dead things - animalics and dried flowers and herbs - but T-Rex is the smell of things dying. Its opening is a colossal fug of cade oil and wet tar so thick it is almost oleaginous. This is the beginning of a perfume that is almost all textures, harsh acrid smoke and ragged burned things.

Fire-and-brimstone perfumes are pretty common in niche and artisan lines, but I find that many of them shy away from embracing the harshness of a true smoke note by tempering them with a sickly sweetness. What results is even more unpleasant than if they had just left the smoke alone, a kind of glazed barbecue smell that makes me queasy. Though there are some sweeter leaning notes in T-Rex it never fully descends into maple-glazed bacon territory. Its brimstone-cade accord is given a huge stage on which to shine so that every sooty, bitter, thick part of its smokiness can be smelled and examined in minute detail. T-Rex feels as if it envelops you in noxiousness like a puff of smoke from a cartoon villain.

When Gardoni talks about his style of perfume making he often speaks of battlefields, clashing notes with their ‘opposite’ to achieve a balance. Though the perfume is so massive and confronting this methodology can be still smelled in T-Rex, which winnows down to a sort of prehistoric floral. These are flowers that are just feeling the first licks of meteoric fire, flame-bright osmanthus and jasmine and champaca. Gardoni throws notes at this perfume like Zeus hurling thunderbolts, bay leaf and nutmeg and resins and a simmering underbelly of patchouli, all of it screaming in an apocalyptic orchestra of deafening volume.

There’s power in the fact that none of us really know what the world of the dinosaurs smelled like, and Gardoni takes advantage of this by making a perfume that smells so violent and unlike anything a human would want to smell that you are forced to relate its loud chaos to an earlier, more primitive time.

Zoologist ties the enormity of this perfume to its apex predator, but this scent is so much bigger than small arms and big teeth. When Zoologist perfumes are good they paint the entire world that surrounds an animal and not the animal itself. T-Rex is the smell of something awful, of a terrible calamity, of chaos too large for a human to comprehend. It’s a perfume that smells like nobody would choose to smell it, which I’ve always found to be a sort of criterion of embarrassment that sets truly artistic scents apart from more commercial offerings.

I smelled T-Rex and thought that this must be the smell of the moment before complete destruction, like the rolling wave of pyroclastic ash that rolled like a tsunami from Vesuvius to smother the poor souls of Pompeii.

I smelled T-Rex and thought well, that’s surely the scent of a Door to Hell. If there was ever a perfume to put into a spell circle to conjure a portal to Hades, it’s this one. Like the transfixing dance of a bonfire or the strange patterns made by a splatter of blood, it fascinated me. I couldn’t stop smelling it, even as the hairs on the back of my neck raised and my fight or flight instinct started getting very nervous indeed.

I thought, what a piece of brilliance. What a damn perfume.

But when I eagerly gave the blotter to my family, their eyes watered. They started coughing. The grimaces developed into full on scowls. It was, I saw clearly, not going well.

‘God, what is that?”

‘Miccaeli, that’s disgusting. You paid money for that?’

‘Why would anybody make that? Why would anyone wear that?’

And then the ultimate condemnation from my brother.

‘That smells,’ he said, ‘like hot burning garbage.’

An impromptu family meeting was called to discuss how terrible this perfume was. As the offending party with the scent on my wrist, I was banished from the room.

In a world of perfumes that only demand a moment of halfhearted attention, you have to give T-Rex its due: it has something to say and it’s saying it at the top of its lungs. Its message is not for everyone, but somehow that makes it an even better perfume in my eyes. Like all the best things it has character, and character means that some people just aren’t going to like you very much.

Burning garbage perfume, T-Rex is now called. It has gained such a notoriety in my family that it is brought up whenever I mention that I’ve smelled something new. It’s like a perfumed shibboleth, the comparison I have to give as a qualifier for any scent I bring into conversation:

‘Yeah, but does it smell as bad as the burning garbage perfume?’

‘‘How can we trust you when you say this one is good? You liked the burning garbage perfume!”

It seems beyond the scope of the conversation to explain to them that I felt mesmerised by T-Rex in the same way that I felt when I looked at the Door to Hell. That smelling it reminds me that humanity can tap into something much deeper and older and darker and stranger than ourselves. That confronting these things makes me feel small, an insignificant speck in the river of time, and that that is somehow so very comforting.

I love that eternity is big; I love that I am so tiny that for my short life there will always be more to learn, more mysteries to uncover. I love that there is a smell in a bottle that I can open and be reminded of this, like a magic elixir. A magic elixir of burning garbage.

That’s what I thought.

What I said was, ‘It’s true. Don’t you know by now that you can’t trust my nose at all?’ ▣