Among the spoils from Esxence I found a mystery little Ziploc containing four sample sprays from a brand called Pills. I vaguely recall them sharing a booth with Mallo. The brand is very new and somewhat mysterious. The fragrances are either art-directed or composed by one Teresa Klus, who apparently “left her mark in the world of art and fashion, exploring identity through color, textures, and emotions.” Remarkably, a search for her name suggests either a nom de plume, a person who has done an amazing job at being web-invisible, or possibly a handsome grandmother from Zielona Góra in Western Poland.
Each fragrance is supposed to be, in the megalomanic patter of all niche websites, “not just a perfume; it’s an olfactory manifesto against the predictable.” I cannot fathom why, of all the arts, fragrance alone has to be more than what it literally is. If you said “more than” about a book, painting or piece of music you’d be laughable.
In style, they are very much in the current cute-simple, kawaii style, designed to relieve adolescents of their disposable income. However, and this is cause for rejoicing, these fragrances are neither trivial nor pandering. They are simple but not stupid. Each is a clever accord, or maybe jingle, of edible or near-edible materials. Technically these might be called gourmands, except that the word is usually applied to the barbaric desserts of the west, all sugar, vanilla and cocoa. Pills fragrances are much more like East Asian sweets, pale pastel in color, soft and fluffy in texture, and subtle in taste.
La Vaina is probably the best use of rhubarb amides I have smelled to date, spliced to a dry-smoky accord simultaneously novel and oddly familiar. London Rain is a delightful herbaceous-sweet confection with the tiniest touch of wet-earth geosmin. Pao Doce is an odd but charming pint-sized hybrid of Bulgari Black and the old Je Reviens. I am not sure I smell all of Supermusk, which is to my nose merely a pleasant soapy-orange composition.
Bulgari Black (asphalt & vanilla) and Je Reviens (old-fashioned nosegay w/inimitable topnote), that's quite a combo to imagine ;-).
They do sound interesting, but I’m not enchanted by ‘Pills’ as a brand name. The blurb says that ‘every fragrance is a sensory capsule’, but I’m just seeing diuretics.