“Got me a movie, I want you to know Slicing up eyeballs, I want you to know” Debaser, The Pixies
David Seth Moltz and Kavi Durga
Brooklyn-based house D.S. & Durga has decided the best way to distract us all from the Winter That Will Not Die is to release a humid, sexy, overripe fig fragrance that simultaneously commemorates both summer camp nostalgia and a song about slicing up eyeballs.
The song is Debaser, by indie rock icons the Pixies, (which was itself inspired by the movie Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, where a woman gets her eyeball sliced open with a straight razor), and the summer camp is where perfumer David Moltz of D.S and Durga met all the cool kids who turned him on to the Pixies sound. As David says it, “I was young at summer camp, but hanging with the cool older kids who smoked cigarettes, skateboarded, and drank. And they hipped me to this suggestive music. There were the hot August nights, the coconut suntan lotion. The green summer air. Humidity. Black Francis”
Debaser as a scent conjures up a damp, humid summer sexuality. There’s no swooning, surreal nonsense here – this nostalgia trip is all about learning how to smoke, punk music, and late nights getting into trouble after curfew. The opening fig note is bursting here – this isn’t the refined and austere Diptyque Philosykos version. Debaser’s fig juice is running down your hands and leaving sticky remnants on everything it lands on. The only thing keeping this composition from becoming yummy, sprayable pulp is a coconut milk and iris combination that shears the fig down into manageable, dessert plate portions. Debaser is delicious, whether you sample it with a napkin or just happily smear the juice all over your face.
Doolittle The Pixies 1989
The fragrance eventually enters a calm zone as it progresses, (just as the hot summer sun does in the late afternoon), and the fig note settles into a quieter, but still exotically bright hum, with the coconut milk remaining cool and sweet throughout the evolution of the perfume. The wild heat it immediately launches at you staggers drunkenly back down the thermometer, and the entire scent achieves an interior temperature balance that won’t burn you out too quickly. There’s some tonka in the drydown and also blond woods that are reminiscent of the mellow campfire all the summer camp kids probably gathered around at dusk. Debaser does what it is designed to do – mainly get all up in your face and convince you to go have fun wearing it. And not to worry – your eyeballs remain intact. The sillage for Debaser and the power are average – this is a scent conjured up from a memory of bygone days, not something you wear to start an enormous cabin-to-cabin pillow fight. Debaser, despite its punk roots in Pixies music, is actually a very warm and approachable scent that will be perfect when summer does come around again. I found it to be a fun, juicy, and sweet confection of a perfume, to enjoy quickly and then go out and play in. In fact, somewhere out there right now, there’s probably some eager and precocious kid just hitting their teenage stride, and who may discover this perfume and get into all kinds of crazy, kinda sexy and silly coming-of-age shenanigans. And who knows what song might remind them of that magical, “no parents around” time in their life? For me, it’s always been Jane’s Addiction that does it. Debaser from D.S. & Durga is wonderful fun, and yeah, summertime rolls.
Notes: bergamot, fig, green leaf, pear stem, coconut milk, iris, tonka bean, blond woods, moss (yes it is a chypre of sorts)
Disclosure: I received my sample from Twisted Lily
Steve Johnson, Editor
Thanks to David Moltz we have a 50 ml bottle of Debaser for a US reader. Please leave a comment with what appeals to you about Debaser and if you can name a punk rock song that would make a great name for a perfume. Draw closes March 8, 2015. Spring ahead btw
We announce the winners on our site and on our Facebook page, so Like Cafleurebon and use our RSS option…or your dream prize wil be just spilled perfume