Many years ago, when I lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I used to shop at a supermarket called Fowlers. A gentleman used to loiter in the wine department. He was in his seventies, tall, slightly stooped, wearing herringbone tweed and elbow patches, with a long face and a warm, James-Stewart–like voice. His name was Mr. Lavender. He was neither customer nor management, and I am still not sure he was an employee. He would offer advice on wine and clearly knew his stuff. He once saw me hold a bottle of Chateau Musar, a good red from Lebanon. He began an impassioned, Ciceronian speech, appealing to my basic decency: “These fine people are making gorgeous wine under constant threat of bombing! Will you not buy it?”
I remembered Mr. Lavender recently when I met Nata Dyshliuk, a Ukrainian artisan perfumer who runs a small outfit called Sentire, pronounced “sen-tee-reh,” the Italian verb meaning to smell. She lives in Kiev on the 16th floor of an apartment block, alarmingly close in altitude to the low-flying drones that the Russians send at night. When that happens, she apparently no longer goes to the shelter, because it is too far, she needs her sleep, and she has got used to the fear. It turned out that Dyshliuk was visiting London, and since I had smelled a couple of her fragrances and liked them, we met briefly.
She is clearly a born perfumer. If perfumery was serious business, and fragrance firms sent scouts out to find talent as modeling agencies do, she would have been snapped up by a major firm long ago. At one point she was discussing different grades and provenances of patchouli with an intensity that put me firmly back in my place as a mere critic.
You cannot currently fly to and from Kiev; you can only go, for example, to Lublin in nearby Poland and then by bus or train to Ukraine. Dyshliuk cannot ship her creations easily and is currently exploring ways of having them compounded in France. In the meantime, some of her work arising from a collaboration is carried by Brooke Belldon at Sainte Cellier. I plan to review those in a separate post.
For paid subscribers, reviews of Kalahari, Lunar Cologne, Solar Cologne, Suede Osmanthus, Rose Heat, Room With a View, Songe de Jasmin and Songe de Narcisse.
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