Coven

There are a few fragrances that attempt to emulate nature in general and grass and rain in particular. Many focus on freshly cut grass or a wildflower meadow. Light, green, floral even slightly sweet with clover. ( Think Marc Jacob's one or the, infinitely superior, Gap Grass ). Guaranteed to lift the spirits. Some go for a more urban interpretation, the smell of ozone and petrichor, of rain-washed streets, of the city wiped clean. Beautiful and evocative. ( Try Miller Harris La Pluie or, of course, Apres L'ondee ). This is neither of those. This is an altogether darker affair. Lost in the heart of the wild Wood. This is darkness and damp moss. There is soil and, yes, petrichor. There's an old tree trunk, fallen without a sound ( there was no one to hear, well, no one living ) but still teaming with life. Of fungi, beautiful but deadly. A Earth Witch plunging her hands into soil and calling forth elemental magic. If I had to imagine a person who would wear this, it would be Stevie Nicks singing about Rhiannon. "All your life you've never seen Woman taken by the wind Would you stay if she promised you heaven?" If you wear this, they will stay. (Postscript: I was tempted to describe this as a "unique" scent but a familiarity niggled at me. It DOES have a doopleganger: Hermes Eau de Gentiane Blanche Cologne. It has lighter, citrus notes but it dries down the same. Both are individual, singular fragrances. As is the person who inhabits them. )

It does smell damp, and very mossy. I don't get any boozy or spicy notes--just a cool greenness. It's like portal opens to a forest in fog, with water dripping quietly onto trunks and leaves and rocks. It has an authentic after-rain smell that soil gets, without that fakeness that a lot of ozonic frags have. And it does have a hint of decay--I think that lends to the the authenticity of it. It's like how I've been shopping for a good sea/ocean frag, but they're either very metallic or light floral/citrus (because who's going to add dead fish and rotting seaweed components when there's ambergris). Coven is the closest thing I've smelled to Demeter's Thunderstorm, which tragically they don't make anymore, but with better longevity than anything Demeter ever made, and decent projection. I love the name, and I like it enough to have worn the sample for three day now as it's pleasant to catch a whiff of outdoorsy in my workday. I just don't know if I'd reach for it very often--it might be something I'd like more as a candle.

Coven is great. It's one of the strongest grass/soil-dominant fragrances I've put my nose on. It's surprisingly fresh for such an ominously titled work. Buried underneath the earthen peat and moss I detect a warm sweetness (perhaps the whiskey?) and strangely enough, a muddled yet noticeable minty note. It kind of tingles the nostrils and adds a confounding ethereal quality to the overall composition. It's like sauntering through some dark, damp woods at 5 am. The air is cold and filled with foggy early-morning moisture and the thick scent of moss and dirt rise up from beneath you. Its very well balanced, and smells satisfying and evocative while still being very wearable and pleasant. My favorite from what I've tried in the Maack line...Coal is a close second. While I do love it, I occasionally get a little bit tired and have to give it a break, but I always return to it. Performs very very well, lasts all day and projects. 8/10

I just got a full bottle of this after draining a sample. To me this is more of a boozy light amber, punctuated by peppery greens. The "soil" is not very pronounced on me. If anything, it serves to just deepen the green notes, making them less fresh. I find it really addictive and love wearing it on warm evenings, where it really blooms. I get the connection to Chypre Mousse, which I also love, but they don't smell the same to me in the least. They share their earthy elements, but CM smells more like wet, loamy soil and mushrooms, with an abstract floral heart. Coven is slightly sweet,boozy, ambery, and green, and I find it pretty accessible and wearable. It's less weird than I thought it would be and I wouldn't call it avant guard, though the brand may have been aiming for that title.

Coven is gorgeous on me. I don't find Coven to be especially dirty, filthy, or dark, but I will say it is brooding, even if it's ultimately fairly traditional. For me it's a very clean warmth overall. The whiskey is very clear on me, in fact, the whiskey and moss pop a lot more than the soil does. I don't get earth or soil at all, to be honest, at least not before the green notes. It's very woodsy and green on me. Green, woodsy, ambery, spicy. I think more of wizards in a tower in the woods reading from ancient tomes more than witches gathering around a campfire in the middle of the night. This wasn't as daunting or harsh as I was made to believe, but still I think it's an incredibly handsome scent and one I'm planning on buying a full bottle of after I'm out of my decant.

This fragrance is gorgeous. It truly is like a walk in dark, mossy woods. Ethereal, atmospheric, simultaneously grounded in dark earth but vibrating with life and complexity. When I first breathed it in, I was wowed. However...I just don't know if it's wearable. Maybe I'm not confident enough or farther along in my perfume journey to wear such a unique and multi-layered fragrance. I think a man could wear this in a daily setting more than a woman, though it is definitely a unisex fragrance. If the reviews intrigue you, just try this out. Whether you buy it or not, the experience of just smelling it on your skin is worth it.

Interesting! This must be a love it or hate it perfume from reading the reviews, and I am definitely on the LOVE IT team. To me it is a stupendous fragrance whose notes get better and better. I liked it so much I kept reapplying to overdose on the smell. It features a grassy, earthy fragrance, made bright and sharp with spices. Each one is so distinctive that you can recognize it in the blend, but together they coalesce into a great perfume experience! It transitions during the drydown to have more of the oakmoss and whiskey featured. Lovely aroma - lasts for hours.

Fascinating one! It opens with a blast of moist, damp, shadowy and mossy forest floor after rain, and dries down to a dark room filled with old, crooked shelves stacked with jars full of herbs, spices and weird looking potions. The name is vey fitting - this is the scent of nature worship and pagan magic. A gorgeous warm, spicy, woody and mossy green scent with a slight moist feeling. The sillage is perfect, not too monstrous, but not to weak either. The longevity is great on my skin. Goes straight on my wishlist. To me it smells like home. <3

Best fragrance ever, of late. End of story .

This is some dark perfumery here. Just starting with the name it evokes a coven of witches in a damp Forrest stirring up witchcraft and of course...their cauldron. It's the fithiest of filthy soil tinctures and moss, which goes far beyond normal acceptability and actually into a realm I find interesting. It's a further place where fragrance goes and runs the full gamete from horrid all the way back to exquisite. Patchouli lovers with like this because it's dank and soily but green and grassy almost figgy in the top notes. As it dries down there's a slight wet wood and a little peppery spice in there too. Great longevity on me...doesn't project all that much which is probably a good thing as it's not exactly a crowd pleaser. Bizarre stuff but not all that unpleasant...still wouldn't wear it though...maybe on Halloween?

Wet earth, moss and pine needles; this is the smell of my garden in the spring time before the temperature climbs up into the comfortable to be outside range. I don’t pick up specific wood notes, but there is an overall alcohol smell—like the way a bar rag might smell. Unfortunate, as I pick up something moldy...past it’s prime. Conceptually, Coven is a very interesting fragrance, and I appreciate the skilled execution, but it’s not something I would want to wear again.

The earth..dirt..soil..grass! Fresh as putting your nose right in it!! What an intriguing idea for a perfume, i think this is an evocative fragrance, it will get you grounded. Don't think others would perceive it as perfume, maybe they will think you have just been digging in garden.

This is one of the strangest fragrances I've had but I like it. This is like a true evil and witchy Halloween scent. Smells earthy but sharp like wet rotting leaves and Halloween mask plastic smell before turning towards the more warm bourbon/cinnamon notes.

Competition for Demeter Zombie? Clawing one's decaying self up out of dark peppery soil for a last drink of burning whiskey - and maybe a wild night of dining on human flesh. Weird to the max.

It smells like hiding in a damp, moss filled cave in the middle of a forest during a massiv autumn rain and drinking cold water from a metal cup.

I like this. It reminds me of Gorilla perfume - Smell of Weather Turning. So nice to run into a fragrance that just smells odd, like me!

العطر ببساطة كأنك جالس على الكرسي بأحد الحدائق وأنته مسافر وتشتم رائحة الطبيعة الخضراء

All I get is minty fresh grass, no earth. I don't get any "dark". Conversely, I get a light vegetal grassy scent. The reviewer that talked about it smelling like an unlit menthol cigarette is on to something. Something between an unlit Salem and fresh grass. This doesn't do much for me.

Once in a while, I have the urge to search for a fragrance that is really wild and unique to satisfy my cravings for originality and creativity, something that would make me bluntly yell out “What on earth is that?” or “What the heck is in here?” Though this could be an endless journey, one such example has recently stopped me in my tracks and made me ponder if I was actually smelling a bottle of fragrance or a piece of landscape from Middle-earth. Thus, I feel compelled to write a little review on Andrea Maack Coven. Andrea Maack is not very well-known, even in the fragrance community. She is an artist from Iceland who has great visions in perfumery. While I like most fragrances in her collection Coven is truly the standout of the bunch, and not because it involves witchcraft. This little potion has me bewitched from the very first spray. Remember those summer days when you were mowing the lawn and you were overwhelmed by the smell of freshly cut grass? Well, Coven will take you for a long stroll down that memory lane. So, if the sound of this repels you even a little bit then stay clear of its path. I admit, the green note is very sharp in this fragrance, one would wonder if you have just rolled yourself in that pile of grass you just mowed or in the tree branches you just cut down. But I warn you, it becomes even more unorthodox as it evolves. So, let’s continue using our lawn example. You mowed it well, pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you did a great job, but luckily all this work was done just before a thunderstorm hit, the rain came down at full force, flipping the soil beneath the piles of grass, transforming your lawn into a muddy pond! Suddenly, the air was somewhat fresher, but there was an unmistakable odor of wet soil around you. And that my friends is the star of this fragrance; “wet soil”. “Are you kidding me?” you ask. I can assure you that my face cannot be more serious than right now as I’m writing this review. Not far from the truth, Andrea has intended Coven to portray a deep and dark forest in the medieval times, possibly where the witches practiced their witchery. What a great rainy day fragrance this might be! So, next time when you mow the lawn, don’t forget to put on some Andrea Maack Coven, with the grassy and wet soil scent you’re projecting you might give your wife the impression that you’ve worked much harder than you did, but please, keep this witchcraft just between you and I.

Before I smelled this, I figured it was too ~niche~ for me to enjoy. You know, the sort of bizarre smelling “conceptual” thing that I just wouldn’t “get”. (See La Curie’s “Odyssey” as an example.) But I was lured by the ever-seductive promise of wet soil. It’s a note that’s hard to be made “wearable” but it’s so moving when it is. I was really surprised that, at least to my nose, this wasn’t some abstruse, cerebral scent that required tons of thinking. I didn’t look at the notes when I first wore it - I just knew it was supposed to evoke soil. More than anything else, this immediately smelled like bourbon and cinnamon. Soil is there too, but to my nose it’s secondary to the booze. I looked and was so amazed that the notes listed were actually exactly what I smelled; that’s very rare, I find. I thought the pairing of soil and booze was really well done, and sets it apart from other damp smelling fragrances. I don’t know that many people cultivate an aesthetic that lends itself to smelling like a drunken grave digger as a signature, but this could have a place in certain scent wardrobes. If the spice and booze pulls through stronger on your skin than the dirt, as it does for me, it might be a nice cold weather/holiday season scent.

I’ve received so many samples of Andrea Maack's Coven from Luckyscent over the years and for some reason I can’t recall any of my previous thoughts on it....which I interpret to mean that it never really impressed me as especially good or bad. This time, however, it’s really left an impression. With notes of soil and moss, Coven is meant to embody a shadowy woodland walk, and I think it's clear the results are pretty divisive. One reviewer notes, and I am paraphrasing here, that it smells like dumpster juice. My own partner thinks it smells like an exploded car battery. I can’t deny that there is a sickly sweet rot at play here, like the dark shadows of Dol Guldur slowly encroaching the Greenwood forest as the feral wizard Radagast the Brown watches in horror while the vegetation blackens and decays before his eyes and many of his beloved animal friends are sick or dying. As it dries, the whiskey becomes apparent, and a strange, sour cumin note emerges to combine with the mossiness and the sense of black mold and mildew and it conjures a sort of hungover Witch-King of Angmar, badly in need of a bath.

Coven Andrea Maack- "Sabbath" Selective pure water. Gothic. Loose wet soil black soil. Green notes are clearly heard through this note, but for me the earth still prevails. Firmness is above average, unlike coal (personally on my skin). The loop is gorgeous! An hour later, after 1.5 the earth leaves :) the aroma is no longer so piercing, it becomes much softer I don’t know due to what to be honest .. can the trunks of trees heated by the sun ..? But you know, I really liked the starting sharpness and sharpness! Unusually at least! As I read in the topics a question with a request to suggest a gothic flavor. So, the coven is a real gothic. If you are a true connoisseur of selective flavors, you must get acquainted with this Creation.

I was actually sampling various oud based fragrances at my local perfume store earlier this year when the sales assistant spontaneously pulled Coven out... I'm still unsure of whether the saleswoman had a psychic vision of me liking it or if the store was attempting to up-sell Coven, but irrespective, I was quick to purchase a bottle (even at the ridiculously inflated Australian price of $185). Basically, I love Coven so much that it has become my signature scent and I am onto my second bottle. Though Coven is obscure and understandably not everyone's cup of tea, I receive more compliments on Coven than I have on any other fragrance I have worn.

This is quite blended, unlike other scents with some similar notes, such as Le Dandy by D'Orsay. For the first few minutes it's quite strong and a bit harsh but that wears off very quickly and I get some soft, vanillic element coming through. It's actually not too far from the smell/taste of Halvah, the dessert item made from sesame seeds. Since I eat Halvah once in a while I'm not sure I want to smell like it. I prefer scents that have a little contrast with non-food items, such as the wood notes in Pure Wood. I intend to wear it again to see if new facets are revealed, which is not uncommon.

THE FIRST TIME I SMELLED ANY OF THE AM FRAGS I WAS REPULSED I THOUGHT NO WAY. EXCEPT DARK. WELL FOR SOME REASON I KEPT SMELLING THEM AND THEY STARTED TO GROW ON ME FUNNY CAUSE SOME OF THEM SMELL LIKE SOMETHING THAT WOULD GROW OUT OF THE GROUND AND THEN THIS ONE JUST SMELLS LIKE THE GROUND OR A BIG OLD WET TREE ROOT PULLED UP. I DON'T KNOW. I AM PUTTING THIS ON MY WANT LIST NOW BECAUSE NOW WHEN I SMELL IT I GET CLEAN FRESH YES ROOTY BUT I LIKE IT. OH AND I BOUGHT SHARP TOO. I WILL MOST LIKELY END UP WITH THE WHOLE LINE.

This fragrance is a duplicate of Chypre Mousse by Oriza L. Legrand, which was launched 99 years prior to Coven. On Luckyscent, 50ml of Coven is $135 ($2.70 per ml), and 100ml of Chypre Mousse is $165 ($1.65 per ml). That said, I say just save your money and get the original. I'm not leaving a formal review of this since I already wrote one for Chypre Mousse. But I will say that regardless of Coven (unfortunately) being a copy-cat, the scent itself is still quite excellent.

The grass notes are there, for sure, but it's more of that wet, freshly overturned soil accord than anything. The fragrance of walking into the underbrush following a hard rainstorm and everything is muddy. A very cool feeling perfume but with something alive underneath it all. A snake or a frog in the grass perhaps. If you've ever been digging in the garden for hours and actually enjoyed the mixture of dirt and leaves on your hands, this is the fragrance for you.

HAHAHA,NOW I'm impressed! This is green, damp, mossy, boozy. I call it a Jurassic Park-Green. Just like the Giant Firs and ferns have smelled back then when T-Rex roamed the earth... presumably. Very strong, good performance as far as projection and longevity. Many scents just disappear on my skin, this one lasts. And here is the kicker: layer this 50-50 with quorum and prep yourself for green-freshness-BLISS! Mark

Finally! A little bit of everything that I absolutely love! Earthy oud that's boozy! :) wow, this house/perfumer is way underrated and I hope she becomes way more noticed for the amazing art pieces she puts out. So far I have sampled 3 offerings sand all are amazing!

Soil.I dont get fresh cut grass as much as I get a dried sweet grass smell like hay. Whiskey notes maybe. Seems too dry down to sweet dry grass & whiskey notes. It's not bad but kind of linear for my taste. Medium sillage that resonates within an arms length.

Opens with soil and grass. Settles on sweet rotting grass from a yard waste bag that’s been sitting in your garage for a few days