Mallo sent a package containing four perfumes, including a full bottle of the extraordinary ARA, which I reviewed recently. I love the wooden boxes with a sliding lid, though it took me a while to figure out how to open them.
Mallo is an all-natural firm from Spain, specifically Zaragoza, capital of Aragón. All-natural perfumes are tricky. For a start, natural materials hardly ever smell like the real thing. The mix of odorants that plants release into the air tends to be different from a solvent extraction, which will likely miss out on the more volatile materials that the plant produces continuously, while over-representing heavier ones. Natural perfumery materials can also be very complex, so they often go through various fractionation steps before they can be marketed to perfumers. The notion that natural materials are necessarily truer to life is therefore misguided.
This said, the sheer power and richness of some naturals is a thing in itself. I remember many years ago visiting Mane in Grasse and being shown a barn full of hay, from which only a few hundred grams of hay absolute would be extracted. In my naive estimation, given that hay absolute is mainly coumarin, I was inclined to think the whole process a waste of time and money. Then my host dipped a strip in 1% hay absolute, and I instantly changed my mind. It was as if every molecule in there had conspired with coumarin to put together a more overwhelming hay smell. I took with me a sample and showed it to Serge Lutens, which I believe prompted his Chergui.
This choral effect has a power all its own. The feeling you get is that evolution has managed to get every odorant in the mix—bass, baritone, tenor or treble—to belt out the same word: “HAY” or “ROSE.” This is nature’s roar, a cataract of smell. The roar of Niagara Falls is not music, but neither is it just noise. It does not have intent the way music does, but it feels as if it contains every tune. Same with natural materials: we feel intuitively that the clamor of hay or rose oil contains a thousand perfumes, that its name is Legion.
What plant naturals of sufficient quality convey best, therefore, is triumphant nature, either in the tropics, where the rush never ceases, or maybe even more so in temperate regions, when it suddenly returns after the silence of winter. The overwhelming force of great naturals is hard to handle. Mix them together, and the roars can cancel out and become noise again. Use only one, and you’re just a bottler. Rarely does all-natural perfumery achieve an effect that does justice to Nature’s huge voice while helping it form words.
Mallo’s all-natural perfumes do this. I hesitate to write what follows because the Mallo website currently lists everything as sold out while I smugly clutch my full bottles, but here goes.
I was sent HOZ, ARC and ORA. All partake in this titanic power. HOZ has a bitter green cast to it, as if you had caught a copse of trees surreptitiously smoking cigars and letting in breezes for fear of getting caught. ORA has a wonderful barnyard note of oud behind a perverse accord of pine and rose.
ARC is the one that does it for me. On first acquaintance you will likely recognize hay and honey, maybe lavender as well. But when this thing is full-on and catches you unawares, the sheer symphonic blast makes you feel like something has entered your bloodstream and is rushing to your brain. There stirs within ARC a living presence. It reminds me of the Green Man, that “avatar of nature’s fury”1, a giant, made of greenery, marching across the landscape, kicking buildings into dust while laughing like thunder.
wonderful phrase delivered by ChatGPT.
Wow. Thank you for this. Reveling in your language is as satisfying as smelling the scents themselves. When you do it this well, there's almost no need to try them! Which is great since apparently we cannot. Bon Weekend!
Thanks for inspiring Chergui - one of my favorites by SL. I love your writing, by the way. Thank you so much for sharing with us.