Nos Republic Cor Serpentis, AI collage by Nicoleta

Nos Republic is one of the brands that reminded me of the reasons why I fell in love with the art of perfumery in the first place. Because when it’s done right, it becomes one of the most effective triggers for imagination, slamming open doors of perception you didn’t even realize were shut. And when the Venn diagram also overlaps on branding, concept, and storytelling – when the copywriting is sharp, the minimalism intentional, and the mood carries that unmistakable Eastern European edge, with just enough darkened beauty around the corners – I go full on golden-retriever mode and enthusiastically rave about it.

Ksenia Golovanova of Nos Republic, photo via the brand

The new series carries forward the brand’s tagline, “Smells like a good story,” and goes into a new collection, aptly named Dark Matters. And we thank Ksenia for opening the door into her creative process, which she so generously shared with us: “Our Moon Child, a moon-inspired fragrance which I’m really proud of, was sort of a preliminary step – a pit-stop before diving into deep space way beyond our Solar system. With Moon Child, we (the perfumer Stéphanie Bakouche and I) tried ourselves at exploring perfume themes less grounded, more ‘spaced-out’, more detached from everything we know and smell here, on planet Earth. And we had so much fun doing it together that it only made sense that I asked Stéphanie to hop on our ‘Dark matter’ spaceship and fly into the unknown.”

The name, Cor Serpentis, comes from a novella by a famous sci-fi writer Ivan Yefremov. The premise – an unexpected encounter of two spaceships, a human one and an alien one, in deep space, just off the Serpens constellation – is brilliant, I think. The humans and the aliens cannot contact each other directly: they do not breathe the same atmosphere and their biochemistries are drastically different. We learn that the aliens come from a planet with a biological life that is beautiful and majestic but nothing like ours. Their air has a purple, otherworldly tinge. Their oceans are made from hydrofluoric acid, with icebergs blue like sapphires. There are powerful electric currents everywhere, generated by the planet’s magnetic field. The radiation coming off the planet’s ‘home’ star – the Cor Serpentis – makes the strange flora flourish, but would be deadly to us, humans and other species of the Earth. It’s a cool, shimmering, poisonous, radioactive and utterly amazing  world. And so are its inhabitants, their limbs sleek and silvery, their long, clever eyes slanted like a snake’s, their body temperature running just at 14 degrees. This made me think hard: what does that world smell like? Can an idea of something alien and probably very deadly be translated into a fragrance with the use of a regular perfume palette? I didn’t want Cor Serpentis to be a friendly, recognizable perfume that can be easily broken into ingredients when you smell it. But I did want it to be beautiful and sort of irresistible — a bit like they show you in those sci-fi movies where astronaut, upon exiting the spaceship that’s just landed on an alien planet, is so shaken and mesmerized by its landscape that he just takes of his helmet foolhardily.

Enter the alien beauty of the seventh fragrance: Nos Republic Cor Serpentis, featuring a new dream-team collaboration between Stéphanie Bakouche and Ksenia Golovanova (if you haven’t already, check out the magic they wove on Moon Child).

Perfumer Stéphanie Bakouche, photo via the brand

After reading the materials from Nos Republic, I giddily awaited the perfume, with the Science Fiction novel by my side – as any true role-player would -trying to fully immerse myself in the story. The perfumes I wore in anticipation, to set the mood, were my self-proclaimed “strange alien green rainforest from another galaxy” duo: the vintage Cacharel Eden and the sadly discontinued Mugler’s Aura. For me, they remain some of the closest attempts at a deep, warm, humid, otherworldly GREEN tasting scents – the kind of vegetal reinterpretations that hint at a rainforest from another realm.

Purple mood image via Unsplash

But from the very first second,  Nos Republic Cor Serpentis is PURPLE – unapologetically, gloriously purple – the most intense yet unsettling one I’ve ever tasted. And of course, my mind immediately starts pulling the threads of its chromatic references that adorn the walls of my olfactive colors pallete: the deep, Tim Burton-esque violet of my beloved Lolita Lempicka; the icy light-indigo posh fuzz of Perfume Sucks Purple; the crystalline coolness of Lancôme Hypnôse; the candied ultraviolet glossy kiss of Guerlain’s Insolence; the iridescent ambery aura of Mugler’s Alien. And then comes the goth-black-laced violet of Poison, the berry bonanza of Lalique Amethyst, and the patchouli-high, smoky-psychedelic of 19-69 Purple Haze descending the stairs to the cellar. On the other side of town, Serge Lutens’ De Profundis offers its funeral-chrysanthemum, green-violet ghost; UNUM’s Lavs expands that mood into cold incense with a monastic, violet-mineral bite; and from there the chromatic scale shoots upward into the milky-blue circuitry of Etat Libre Orange’s The Ghost in the Shell and the pale-soapy, celestial blue of Jul et Mad Stairway to Heaven. Together they become a strange, shimmering map of purple emotions and half-forgotten memories in hues that orbit, clash, blur into one another, and eventually give in to the gravitational field of this impossible color.

Purple has always been the perfect collision point – both intellectually and emotionally – the ultimate expression of tension and fusion. It sits exactly where two opposing worlds crash into each other: the fiery hot red of passion, blood, danger, and immediate impulse, and the cool blue of distance, restraint, and logic. And in that split second before the bang, there is purple, the beautiful fracture between the two separate worlds. Chromatically, it’s the last visible stop before the spectrum slips into the invisible ultraviolet, the edge of human perception, set in that liminal zone where matter dissolves, and the familiar laws of reality start glitching. Color psychology and olfactory research point to the same thing: violet triggers the brain’s deepest emotional center – the amygdala. It’s the color of seeking: of inner well-being and self-assurance, and that has an uncanny mix of melancholy and clarity that only comes when you’re living half inside your own head. And Cor Serpentis uses this exact frequency. It behaves like a distorted mirror, the kind a “true role-player” recognizes immediately – forcing you to confront the beautiful strangeness of your own imagination, amplified to cosmic proportions.

Ocean mood image, via Unsplash

“Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch./My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled/ And I was frightened. He said, Marie,/ Marie, hold on tight. /And down we went.” *

And in Cor Serpentis, down we go as well – first hovering above the alien ocean, the seconds stretch into long, trembling lines, pulling the visible world into distorted knots. The lungs open and close, crystallizing and solidifying the artificial ozone trapped inside the space suit and a neon-blue haze flickers across the visor. And then the descent begins – a slow slide through a violet-tinged atmosphere, camphorous and minty, hands grazing iridescent borders where static light pulses in rapid-fire bursts through your fingertips. What first hits you is that sulfurous berry snap: quick, bright, almost edible, such a beautiful, succulent lure. And yet the amygdala fires instantly, red-hot danger, because nothing ripe gets this ripe without an inverted sun blazing upon it. The sap here is iridescent and irradiant, chlorophyll re-coded by a strange star; vegetal life that never learned the yellow warmth of our sun but grew instead under a cold, distant light.

“I was really inspired by the idea of an alien forest – alluring, but also dangerous. So, what I did was play around the fruitiness of blackcurrants and their sulfuric undertones: the smell of sulfur is something we humans can detect from very far, it gives off a sense of danger. And that’s exactly the effect I was looking for with this perfume.” – Stéphanie Bakouche

Nos Republic Cor Serpentis, mood image via the brand 

“Frisch weht der Wind /Der Heimat zu /Mein Irisch Kind/ Wo weilest du?”**

We awaken in the blue mist – a jungle thick with oversized leaves, bitter-edged, swollen with sap that glistens like liquid mercury. And then the alien flowers appear from the trees – the spectre of white petals lit from within, almost radioactive. There’s a trembling quality to the blooms – a lighter shade of pale traced in neon, amplified by metallic aldehydes that make your ears ring – as if the flowers and branches themselves vibrate at a frequency human ears were never meant to register.

“Pine absolute, in contrast to the much more common essential oil we associate with floor cleaning products, is a rare, precious material – not many perfumers work with it. The smell is divine: it’s like diving head first into a heap of soft pine needles and having all these sweet, deep green, resinous smells envelop you. And when you overdose it like I did, it reveals a sort of a strange, luminous acidity.” – Stéphanie Bakouche.

Nos Republic Cor Serpentis, mood image via the brand 

“Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not /Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither /Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,/Looking into the heart of light, the silence/ Oed’ und leer das Meer”***

Something stirs. A deer-like creature steps out of the haze, so absurdly familiar, yet so strange – with its wet fur sliding from under our hand for a second before it dissolves back into the luminous undergrowth. The air shifts – mineral, cold, damp, carrying a strange animalic breath – an insidious unease of a Lovecraftian taste, a slight pressure at the edge of perception. A fragrant reminder that the mind (or the nose), when confronted with an unfinished shape, will rush to complete it – even if what it completes is something it was never meant to see (smell?).

“I like the idea of tangled, smoky vetiver roots working in the base of the fragrance to evoke the richness of an alien soil, the process of organic matter breaking down in it. Also, the vetiver I used blends really well with the pine and the costus, a rich material that smells sweaty and leathery, earthy and animalic at the same time.” – Stéphanie Bakouche

Screenshots from the movie Annihilation(2018) directed by Alex Garland, fair use

P.S. And if I am to fall down the rabbit hole of movie-books associations, there is this movie starring Natalie Portman, Annihilation, based on the fabulous science-fiction trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, which follows the story of an alien civilization beginning a slow, insidious conquest of the world – infesting a jungle “X-Zone” and altering the physical properties of plants and animals within its borders. The visuals of the film, especially the translucent barrier, perfectly capture the concept of “the Shimmer” -that vague, barely-there, perceptible manifestation of the foreign presence. This was the first association I made when wearing the perfume, and not a day passed without “seeing” my aura turn iridescent purple while wearing Cor Serpentis.

Nos Republic Cor Serpentis, AI Collage by Nicoleta

In the end, Cor Serpentis feels like the purest embodiment of Nos Republic’s creed: “Smells like a good story.” And what Stéphanie Bakouche and Ksenia Golovanova achieve together is rare: a fragrance that draws you in only to push you further into the unknown — and, who knows, perhaps even reveal your true colors.

.Quotes: **The Waste Land Quotes by T.S. Eliot

Top notes: Alien, remote; Heart notes: Cold, venom, glowing; Base notes: magnetic Ozone, acidic ocean, camphor crystals, blackcurrant, pine absolute, alien minerals, vetiver

Nicoleta Tomsa, Senior Editor

Disclosure:  A bottle of Cor Serpentis was kindly offered by the brand, opinions are always my own.

Thanks to the generosity of Nos Republic we have a 50 ml bottle of Cor Serpentis for one registered reader from EU, US or UK. You must register or your entry will not count. To be eligible, please leave a comment saying what sparks your interest based on Nicoleta’s review and where you live. Draw closes 12/18/2025

Also check out my reviews on Nos Republic Bad Wolf and Moon Child

Queer de Russie was an Art and Olfaction winner 2024 Best Newcomer– Michelyn

For our US readers: Great News Nos Republic is sold at Luckyscent here (you can try the sample set or buy a bottle)

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