Remnants of Villa Sampieri Talon in Bologna. Credits Ermano

On the first sunny day of 2021, I couldn’t help going outside for the first legitimate long walk of the year. So I planned to explore Parco Talon, formerly the lush garden of a baroque villa set between the suburbs of Bologna and the foothills of the Emilian Apennines along the Reno river. Over time, the park became a famous meeting place for many well-known personalities of the time, among  including no less than Rossini, who held various concerts there, and Stendhal who described it as being the beautiful equivalent of the Parisian Bois de Boulogne. Most of the magnificent buildings designed by Galli Bibbiena (who also built the Ducal Palace of Colorno and worked for various European Royal Courts) collapsed under the bombings of WWII, and yet, to my great surprise, a wing of the Villa was preserved because various endangered species of bats found their ideal shelter there.

Geosmin molecule apped by Michelyn via Wiki

“Definitely those bats have style!” I thought as the cold air flowed inside me, tickling my nostrils with the earthiness rising from the moist soil. Geosmin, a molecule whose pervasive, cold and extremely earthy aroma is responsible for the smell of petrichor, is also closely related to the lifecycle of bats in nature; those dark creatures love it, for it guides them to their roosts, and in localizing food sources in the gloom. As a professor at the University of Washington, Dr. Ellen Covey spent many years studying bats and understood this well; she was perhaps not the first to use geosmin, but surely was the first to use it together with a few other materials to enhance its effect and put it front and center as an obvious note in a perfume like never before.

Olympic Orchids Night Flyer original art by Dr. Ellen Covey

Perfectly rendering the cave scentscape and yet astonishingly managing to keep the result totally wearable, Olympic Orchids Perfumes Night Flyer is the stunning game changer that truly legitimized geosmin in perfumery. The former Zoologist Bat, conceived and formulated by  Dr. Ellen Covey, won the Independent Category of the 2016 Art and Olfaction Awards as a groundbreaking, masterful fragrance; it also redefined the boundaries of animalic, thus deserving so in all respects to be considered a Modern Masterpiece.

Olympic Orchids founder Dr. Ellen Covey 

The first thing I pictured in my mind about a bat-inspired perfume made by a neuroscience researcher was an image of Dr. Ellen Covey as a sort of Dian Fossey in a faraway jungle surrounded by upside-down mammals. As she confirmed “I actually  became interested in bats when I first started as a research faculty member at Duke University. A graduate student brought some bats to the lab, and we started studying them. I have done my share of tramping through jungles, crawling through caves and attics, and hanging out with the upside-down little animals, so your image isn’t that far off”.

 The temptations of St. Anthony by David Ternier II, 1626

Contrary to the evil imagery surrounding these extraordinary animals fostered by novels like Bram Stoker’s Dracula or even before by religious popular beliefs as can be seen in David Ternier’s The temptations of St. Anthony, there’s nothing gothic or shady in this bat; it’s not the decadent Transylvanian chiroptera,  but more likely the playful fruit bat in a colorful scientific illustration putting a smile on your face.  Dr. Covey describes how she came up with a way to tame the extreme earthiness of the cave accord with a cheerful fruity aspect “The pairing of cave smells with a fruity accord was a natural juxtaposition given that fruit bats live in caves. Some species of bats actually have a body odor that is musky-fruity, a little like Night Flyer”. It took her about a year to shape the fragrance according to her vision, fine tuning it to make the musty, mineral gloom of geosmin, patchouli and myrrh wearable with what to my nose is a genius fruity accord. At first you simply smell it as unripe bananas, but it’s just a glimpse of how multifaceted the whole composition is.

Flying Fox by Walton Ford for Juxtapoz Magazine, May-June issue 1999©

On the skin, Night Flyer unfolds the whole jungle of the Cockpit Country of Jamaica, with the lush greenery of banana leaves highlighted by the minty, sulphurous juiciness of blackcurrant, which bridges so nicely with geosmin adding depth. The opaque sweetness of ripe fruits is poured over the rough earth to smooth the edges, wrapping them In the banana-like, unctuous floralcy of ylang-ylang and pulpy figs backed by a generous amount of soft musks that lend their raspberry tinged puff. The drydown of Night Flyer is calmer. While it still bears mineral echoes from the cave, it’s brightened by an original tonka bean-sprinkled leather, as supple as the skin on the little mammals’ wings.  Subtle strokes of vetiver enhance the moist bitterness of the surrounding vegetation,  evoking ancient- deep-reaching tree roots plunging in the damp soil for an adventurous, unique scent trail.

Back in 2015, the launch of Zoologist Bat composed by Ellen Covey might have encouraged other perfumers to experiment more with geosmin, as we can smell from Etat Libre d’Orange Hermann à mes côtés (2015) where Quentin Bisch paired it with the watermelon-tinged ghost of a metallic rose. Another memorable example that followed is the award winning Michele Bianchi’s Humus (2017) where he poured geosmin over a brown sugar sprinkled red berries cup to recreate the smell freshly unearthed sugar beet crops caramelized by the Apulian blazing sun.

Night Flyer notes include sandalwood, olibanum wood,  vetiver, furry musk accord, wet earth, damp air, mineral notes, resins, leather, figs, banana, soft tropical fruits.

Sample of the original 2015 Zoologist Bat from my own collection, opinions as always my own. Night Flyer has not changed its original 2015 formula and was  rereleased with a different name and imagery in 2020

Ermano Picco, Editor and Perfume Expert

Thanks to the generosity of Olympic Orchids, ÇaFleureBon has a 30ml bottle of Night Flyer for one registered reader residing in the USA, OR a 5ml for anywhere else in the world. To be eligible for the draw, please leave a comment about what aspect of Ermano’s  article you enjoyed and let us know where you live.  We have featured Olympic Orchids many times over the years; do you have a favorite. Draw closes 1/22/2021

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