Senyokô Paris Madama Butterfly II Silver Fox ©
I am in quiet love with Senyokô Paris Madama Butterfly II, a luxuriant oddity from a beautiful fairytale house, a beguiling coalescence of French and Japanese aesthetics, founded by Creative Directors Joseph and Eglantine Berthion. Along with Migration De L’Abre, La Tsarine and Duo de Fleurs, they have delivered one of the most gorgeous lines I have tried for a while.
Euan McCall of Edinburgh-based Jorum Laboratories
The perfumer is Euan McCall of Edinburgh-based Jorum Laboratories who has recently just launched his own beautifully complex sui generis Progressive Botany Collection Vol I for Jorum Studio. Madama Butterfly II smells of boozy raspberries soaking on a layer of langue de chat biscuits, pricked with pink pepper. There is sakura or cherry blossom in the heart of the scent along with a squeaky tulip accord and iris, but I can’t shake the feeling Euan has scented an entire avenue of sakura with lush raspberry and is amused by the unexpected juxtaposition of odour as the petals fall. He has done something unusual in the opening, mingling the crisp honeyapple vintage vibe of quince with the rubbed golden-stain rub of marigold. Alongside the drunken berry note the brain registers seductive slo-mo crossfire of effects before deeper, richer notes settle in. Of these it is the tonka that enriches the most, seeping a moist gathered hay and velveteen vanilla haze around sandalwood, cedarwood and chocolate tinged patchouli.
The Silver Fox ©
Senyokô Paris Madama Butterfly II has wingbeats of gourmand flourishes, but they are carefully sweet. The more I wear it the more I sense a calmness, a throwback to the moment of Cio Cio San arranging flowers in her house, waiting for the bounder Pinkerton to arrive, her heart swelling with love and expectation, the blooms around foreshadowing where love will spill red onto haunted ground. I like to imagine each spray of crushed raspberry is in fact a sanguine stain of devastated Geisha’s blood, shed for honour.
Senyokô Paris©
La Tsarine is a very different animal, a musky smutpiece that De Sade would have relished. An unlikely reference is the anatomically graphic furniture made for Catherine the Great, decorated with eye-popping phalli, scrota and a garden of vulvae. One of her main tables is exquisitely obscene, rendered to shock eye and mind into appalled delight. Civet, cumin, costus and castoreum under honey, saffron and indolic jasmine absolute serve a similar odorous purpose in La Tsarine. I am considering this as fabulous sillage pornographiqe, and for now will admire at a distance, it’s a just a little too much for migraine-me. But if you like your perfumes like peeled-off latex after safe-word sex then this is your glandular, glorious juice.
Senyokô Paris©
Migration de L’Abre, a 2019 Art & Olfaction finalist, is a green gorgeous wonder of muted, fairytale sadness. Greens hang like so many leached wallpapers in abandoned country mansions, moss, mould, leaves encroaching. It is a rendering of Last Year’s Tree, a sad little fable written in the 1930s by Nankichi Niimi about a bird and the tree he sings to. Within this complex formula of chewy mastic, amber, pomegranate, elemi, clary sage, juniper and a mellow marriage of nigella seed and tobacco is a haunting concept of mutual dependency. Tree dies, bird dies.
Occasionally perfumes come along that fill my hermit rooms like photoluminescent insects. Duo Des Fleurs is one of these experiences, a duet between massively rendered rose de mai and jasmine. It is enormous and I LOVE it. There is such turbulence in the indolic boom and intriguingly the rose jasmine minglesmell of leaf, thorn, sepal, pollen, bud and petal amplify on warm skin, sometimes to the point where the floral music is overwhelming. An impressionistic use of creamy sandalwood and warm apricotty blush of Davana provides eloquent ground for the lashings of floral extravagance. The crux of Duo Des Fleurs is a Mitti Attar accord created by Euan to give the impression that the perhaps rose and jasmine is forbidden lovers fleeing in monsoon rain.
Silver Fox ©
Along with Senyokô Paris Madama Butterfly II these three remarkable demonstrate how imagination, aesthetic recognition, persistent attention to olfactive and design detail a startup brand can create a small collection of immensely beautiful and original work.
Bravo.
Samples kindly provided by Senyokô Paris. Merci inifiniment. Opinions now and always will be my own.
-The Silver Fox, Guest Contributor, (retired) and Photographer
Thanks to the generosity of Senyokô Paris we have a 50 ml bottle of your choice for a registered reader anywhere in the world. You must register or your comment will not count. To be eligible tell us what you enjoyed about The Silver Fox’s reviews, which you would choose, and where you live. Draw ends 9/13/2019
This is our Privacy and Draw Rules Policy
Follow us on Instagram @cafleurebon @everdandyfox @senyokoparis
All art by The Silver Fox and Senyokô Paris unless otherwise note.
We announce the winners only on our site and on our Facebook page, so like Çafleurebon and use our blog feed…or your dream prize will be just spilled perfume.