Nose Republic

peak niche

Ksenia Golovanova. Pic from noserepublic.com website

Six years ago, a Russian publisher expressed interest in a translation of our 2018 guide, and an editor of Harper’s Bazaar Russia suggested Ksenia Golovanova, a well-known Moscow-based perfume blogger, as a translator. I contacted her and asked whether she would be interested. She replied that she knew all along that she was destined to be the translator, so yes, and that was that. She did an apparently brilliant job, though my Russian is nowhere near good enough to tell.

Russia has given a lot to us smellers. Ernest Beaux (Chanel No.5) was Russian, and Rallet, for which he invented the first aldehydic perfume, was a Moscow-based firm. Sweet Sauternes wine flavored by noble rot, another great olfactory experience, owes its existence to Peter the Great’s fondness for it, which turned it from an anomaly into an industry. My own greatest perfume find was in the antiques store of the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, a pristine, unopened bottle of Houbigant’s Parfum Idéal (1900), which I eventually donated to the Osmothèque for analysis.

I had vaguely heard that Ksenia Golovanova had started her own perfume brand. When I started work on the latest batch of samples from Bloom Perfumery, I collected the five Nose Republic sprays and idly looked up the website, whereupon a nice photo of Ksenia popped up. She and I have never met, and it was great to see her. One day, when the war is over, we will meet in Moscow, one of my favorite cities, and celebrate with half-sweet shampanskoye¹ and pressed caviar from Astrakhan.

I always feel some trepidation when reviewing fragrances done by someone I know. I have occasionally refrained from reviewing some fragrances for fear of losing a friend. No such problem here: these are beautifully worked-out paragons of the niche genre. What defines niche at this point? These small, upstart firms have been around for decades. They can’t be defined by exclusion from the mainstream, since niche brands now occupy much of the perfume floor in department stores. Niche sometimes reminds me of the Impressionists, forever described as hard done by even as they were counting the money from sales to kings and emperors.

It seems to me that niche is akin to a naïf tendency in painting translated to smell. A niche fragrance must somehow feel simple, as compared to what I lately described as the chemical rococo tendency of big-brand fragrance. That rococo exists in good part because perfumers who are restricted to cheap aromachemicals, as opposed to complex, expensive naturals, achieve complexity by piling on loud and ultimately nauseating accords, which might be described as the wall of smell, by analogy to Phil Spector’s “wall of sound.”

As always, though, simplicity is a complicated thing. Incompetent niche fragrances misunderstand the problem and just work with niche signifiers, like incense, smoke, oud, etc. Good ones keep in mind that you can’t just “make the right noises”; they must add up to music. Nose Republic shows unmistakable signs of classical know-how. Yes, all the fragrances start with bright, legible, striking accords, but in time you see that the joinery is of a high standard. Ksenia Golovanova credits the perfumers. Two of them are known to me, Stéphanie Bakouche and Cristiano Canali, both brilliant talents. The drydowns, always the most telling part of any fragrance, are soft and clear. This is peak niche. It makes me wonder what comes next.

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