Jack Nicholson in a scene from The Shining Directed By Stanley Kubrick as he looks in the mirror of the bathroom of Room 237
Do you ever experience moments in your life that appear normal at the outset, but then your body starts sending little warning signals up your spine or in the back of your throat? A little twinge that your nervous system sparks you with to let you know that maybe, just maybe, now would be a good time to stop what you’re doing and walk away slowly? I don’t recall any genre in perfumery known as Creepy Scents, but there needs to be one now, because San Francisco-based perfumer Bruno Fazzolari’s Room 237 has been giving me the yips ever since I first applied it.
Bruno Fazzolari
Çafleurebon readers should be well-acquainted with Bruno Fazzolari’s work. He is a fine artist as well as a perfumer, and the stunning Au Dela Naricsse de Montagnes was featured in Behind Bottle series the in October 2014. And Çafleurebon was also the first perfume blog to review his inaugral line of fragrances: Lampblack, Five, Jimmy, Monserrat and Au Dela.
Ick… the decrepit woman who comes out of the bathtub in Room 237
Room 237 gets its title from the haunted hotel room in the Stanley Kubrick horror movie, The Shining (1980), and for those who have seen the film, there REALLY SHOULD NOT BE a perfume based on it. NOTHING that went on in that room needs remembrance through scent, and yet Room 237, if you can scour your mind and bleach your eyeballs from any association with The Shining, is actually a great pick for a transitional Spring-into-Summer perfume.
Opening Sequence The Shining
It’s a green scent with a difference. Instead of dewiness and visions of bright, stemmy growing things, Room 237 is loaded with decay. The main accord is a vinyl shower curtain that hasn’t seen a sponge in years. This green scent takes the expected vibrant freshness and only offers it for a fleeting instant, before a slight dampness creeps in at the edges, with a hint of mold and warm soap. My throat started to constrict a little as my body recognized the notes in this fragrance and what they might represent. I once had a roommate in San Francisco whose bathroom smelled like this. It looked totally normal as long as you didn’t look up at the ceiling, which was completely covered in enormous, blooming black mold spores.
The ghost behind the shower curtain in the Green Bathroom in Room 237
And yet, for all its disturbing qualities, Room 237 might be a fantastic scent for when summer gets here and the beaches start to fill up. That icky shower curtain vinyl accord has a sea salt-like tang to it, and the warm soap vibe will settle in well on sunburnt skin. After all, this fragrance could be seen as a kind of “clean scent” – it’s just a clean on its last legs, and the person it cleaned is still lying in wait in a mildewy clawfoot tub for some poor soul to open the locked door to Room 237. Fortunately for the wearer, the sillage remains close to the skin, as all invasive bacterial growth should. This fragrance is very quiet, eerily quiet, and the longevity is good for several hours.
My advice is to take Room 237 on its own terms and forego its inspiration. It is a definitely unique scent, and one that provides an entirely shocking and unusual take on what we expect from green-tinged fragrances. I can see the Etat Libre D’Orange crowd loving this, or any perfume addict who is drawn to the darker side of perfumery. But for me, the movie source material is too vivid in my mind to have a scent like this on my skin for very long.
Eerie GhostTwin Girls appear outside the door of Room 237
It’s a very unique and profoundly disturbing perfume and every bit the olfactory equal to the visceral images of Kubrick’s work as the director of The Shining. Who knows – it might even make the best bedtime scent for horror movie fans. But for now – I’m going to just pretend it’s an offbeat summer scent and leave it at that. SHIVER.
Steve Johnson, Editor
Disclaimer: I got my sample from Bruno Fazzolari Perfumes
Notes: Flea bane, Angelica, Oppoponax, Costus Root, Peculiar Florals, Vinyl Shower Curtain
Editor's Note: Room 237 is also the title of a documentary by Rod Ascher in 2013, that explored the hidden meanings, symblism and theories behind Kubrick's The Shining. I did the art direction-Michelyn
We have a draw of a sample of Room 237 for a US reader. Bruno creates his fragrances in small batches and we squirreled away an extra 1.5 ml vial to share as it almost gone. To be eligible, please enter a comment below and tell us why you would like to win Room 237, if you saw the Shining or if you have a favorite horror movie, TV show or book. Draw closes May 5, 2015
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