Photo by SaphireIo

Neil Young’s 1979 album “Rust Never Sleeps” is bookended by two versions of the same song; ‘Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black)’ and ‘My, My, Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue)’. Each song has this verse in it:

Out of the blue
and into the black
They give you this,
but you pay for that
And once you're gone,
you can't come back
When you're out of the blue
and into the black.

David Falsberg and Yosh Han

This came to mind as I tested the new perfume from the Seattle, WA independent perfume house of Phoenecia Perfumes. The reason it came to mind was the story of the perfumer, David Falsberg, behind Phoenecia Perfumes. Mr. Falsberg lost his sight in 2007, for about a year, caused by a condition called Stevens Johnson Syndrome. While sightless his sense of smell became more acute and that has led to him creating the Phoenecia Perfumes line. I became aware of Mr. Falsberg because I’ve been following the gatherings of the Northwest Indie Perfumers Circuit on Facebook and Phoenecia Perfumes were featured in February.  That brought me to the Phoenecia Perfumes webpage and Mr. Falsberg’s blog “5mL of Alchemy”; after that I ordered a bottle of his fragrance called Skin Graft.

Photo by SaphireIo

Skin Graft according to the website is described as, “A project from the imagination, I was in an induced coma when my skin was grafted. I thought about bandaids and alien flowers while creating this.”  Skin Graft is a fragrance born of trauma and as I tested this I found it initially to be an unsettling experience. Skin Graft is the heightened smell of hospital corridors and all of the associated smells that go with them. As I wore it a second and third time I came to welcome this clean antiseptic smell tinged with a bit of healing and it went from being unsettling to familiar.

Skin Graft is a very simple composition which creates a complex olfactive landscape. Mr. Falsberg uses honey and the very synthetic Iso-E-Super to set up the ultra-sterile halls of the hospital and the slightly sweet aspect of bandages. A full indolic jasmine sambac along with opoponax and woody notes create the “alien flowers” accord but to my nose it is also an accord of healing skin as the body works hard to recover. My first wearing of Skin Graft made me a bit jumpy because Mr. Falsberg re-creates the hospital milieu so well it is hard to disassociate those kinds of scent memories.

Skin Graft has above average longevity and average sillage.

Photo by SaphireIo

Skin Graft is a piece of olfactory art that will not be to everyone’s taste and many will probably not even want to come close to trying it because of the hospital association. I found that over three days of wearing Skin Graft it gave me an opportunity to examine my reaction to hospitals and sickness. From the nervousness of being in the hospital to waking up each day to a familiar odor letting me know I was still alive. I don’t know if this is what Mr. Falsberg meant for Skin Graft to do but it does what any good piece of art should do; it challenges my assumptions. With the success of Skin Graft I close the same way Neil Young closes ‘”Rust Never Sleeps” because Mr. Falsberg exemplifies coming “Out of the Black and Into the Blue.”

Disclosure: This review was based on a bottle of Skin Graft I purchased .

–Mark Behnke, Managing Editor

Editor’s Note: For more information on Stevens-Johnson Syndrome visit www.sjsupport.org