When I lived in Rome I sometimes went to the Byzantine church. There was something about the entombed, mosaics of silence and candles; the resinous smoke of benzoin and frankincense and the sombre, Byzantinian chants, that took you out of yourself and transcended you to another realm. You could feel it. You could almost imagine believing.
Francesca Bianchi’s new release is a brooding, and slightly melancholic, amber with styrax and cinnamon, labdanum, ambergris; a bifocal of amber and leather; the amber softening and sweetening the leather, the leather giving a novel tint to the amber. Though linear and ‘solid’ – there is not much room for manoeuvre in this scent – a mood is immediately set in place upon application. And I particularly like the fact that all fades, eventually, to the unpristine, lingering – and very human, smell of benzoin.
