Sirenide

I bought Sirenide on impulse. To be honest, a rare blind purchase for me, especially since I usually avoid marine-themed fragrances. But intuition called and... I followed. I expected a modern reinterpretation of the aquatic florals of the early 2000s, something reminiscent of older Kenzo or Issey Miyake creations: that laconic melancholy of lotus, still air, inner peace. What I received was entirely different and so much more. It was love at first breath, the kind of connection with a scent that makes you immediately know: this is mine. The perfume opens with a strong almond note. It is sweet and welcoming at first, but quickly turns bitter, perhaps mixing with anise, which literally evokes associations with cyanide. Imagine cracking a cherry pit between your teeth, that addictive yet threatening aroma (given the darkened and romanticised image of cyanide in culture). Next comes the heart: water flowers, tender and wet, with a subtle white-floral character. I catch nuances of orange blossom in this accord, but I can easily believe a water lily might smell like that. Fragile and alive floral scent. And then the floral heart meets the breath of the sea... and oh, I do love the sea here! It is not the ozonic kind found in typical marine perfumes, but the smell of a northern coast with melting snow, damp air and just a slight drop of salt. The base, for me, is a soft leather accord blended with something synthetic yet intriguing. I suppose this is what was meant to be plastic, but I sense the smell of latex, and it contrasts (yes, beautifully!) with the organic and fluid heart. Purity against artifice, tenderness opposed to danger, this is what Sirenide’s beauty is for me. Some perfumes comfort you, wrapping you in blissful warmth. Sirenide does the opposite. It stirs the soul, especially when you are living through a time of contradictory emotions. Soul scent. Mine.

Received this as a 2 ml freebie along with a hand-written note from its maker, after ordering the Revenant discovery set. The opening is bilateral, bitter almonds and anise, an almost medical smell that somehow makes me think of absinthe. The notes remain the same throughout the scent's evolution, only dying down in intensity to reveal some complexity and sophistication from the mid notes which I could not guess for the life of me. Luckily, the anise dissipates rather quickly and lets the scent normalize and become livable with. It reaches its final form 4 hours later and stays like that for over 36 hours. This is the strongest longest lasting scent that I have ever tried, with the exception of Fleur de Peau from Diptique. It will not vanish, it will not die in intensity and after 24 hours the scent changes character and is softer, warmer and almost feminine. For a woman's fragrance you must be highly disagreeable to wear this or find it wearable. This offends to some extent and even at its most soft and feminine form it's still cold odd bitter and somehow repelling, despite not being a bad smell whatsoever. Hard to describe the targeted demographic. This is a scent that discourages sane men to pursue you and puts distance between you and other people in general. Very artistic good composition aimed at nobody, which is probably why it's a master piece. Fits on the likes of Medusa from Little Siren, or Mia Khalifa. Using it as a car fragrance makes much more sense than as a perfume.

It's weird but cool. Refreshing but bitter. This is absolutely my bag, but I totally understand that this isn't for everyone. It's an almond scented nail polish. As a novice perfumer myself, this is really interesting and quite impressive. It smells like that liquid soap that smells like almond/cherry with an added algae and watermelon. This is for the leather jacket, heel bitten jeans and cowboy boot wearers that also happen to love Steely Dan. It's very expressive and I urge you to give this a try on skin and judge it AFTER at least 10 minutes. I guarantee half of the negative reviews are based off the first few seconds of this perfume. Yes, it's very strong and solvent-y straight away, but if you just give it a proper wear test you'll see that it's beautiful. Also, I wouldn't recommend spraying this on the front of your neck because I could see how it would then become nauseating. It's such an awesome perfume and I feel sorry for anyone that doesn't like it because I don't know what I'd do without it. Today's SOTD and I'm loving it. Really strong performance overall if you care about that. At £2.50/ml I would give this an 8.5/10. Not the greatest value for money but still beautiful and such a fun wear. You definitely won't be smelling like anyone else on the street.

The opening is wow-inducing for sure - the peculiar combination of metallic almond, dense aquatic florals and plastic is like nothing I've smelled before. It's unsettling and uncomfortable, yet hypnotizing. The almonds start to dissipate during the drydown and that's when the fragrance start to become monothematic and loses its spark. The whole scaffold of the fragrance is build around huge overdose of Nympheal - the water lily molecule with watermelon undertones that is one of the longer lasting muguet materials. It's present from start to finish, and that's almost all I can smell in later hours. Makes the deep drydown smell similar to the deep drydown of LV Meteore. I wish it was tad bit more complex during that stage, but I still find it unique and different. As usual, fragrantica notes are incomplete. Info from Beaufort: Top Notes: Blue flag iris, water hawthorn, bitter almond & aniseed Heart Notes: Water lily & pink lotus Base Notes: Ambergris, cedar atlas, woodruff & pinseal Perfumer: Euan McCall

My favourite BeauFort London fragrance and something for the beach goths, this smells—to me—like a wedding by the sea, there's notes in here I can't put my finger on, something poetic, the drydown is so so different to the opening (which lasts an hour on my skin) yet both are precious and delicate. A romantic juice. I really wanted to love BeauFort, but I find they don't last or project, are slightly derivative maybe, but then I tried Sirenide. Game changer for me. I don't know why, but I think of Call Me By Your Name, it smells like the colour pallet. Sounds dumb. I d'know, but what I do know is that I love this perfume and I would commit to 100ml if it was available. Signature worthy for me, wedding worthy if I marry by the sea in summer. Wait, what /will/ I wear on my wedding day!? 10/10

This has become one of my absolute favorite fragrances. It starts off with this incredibly potent powdery bitter almond and anise. Im not sure which note gives it this but it truly does have a poisonous vibe! Almost smells like acrylic used for nails. Once its dried down a bit I get more of the lotus and sandalwood, but that powdery almond lingers throughout and almost gets sweeter with time. This fragrance is truly everlasting ive never tried something so potent. This will stay on your jacket 4 days after spraying on it. And this fragrances energy is so effortlessly unique. Smells like a prankster water nymph who lives in a liminal y2k nail salon. My favorite going out scent.

very very beautiful, i keep smelling this sample and im reeled back in every time. it has a very unearthly, almost alien quality to it, and the bitter almond and water lily combine to impart an eerie femininity to the fragrance.

I love this. Floral and sensual from afar. Pvc and almond mix with the floral when you get close. It feels like a sirens lure and you notice the danger too late. Sooo addictive and my new signature!

AMAZING! I've never smelled anything like this before and was pleasingly surprised after all these copies after copies for years out there. It's just pure S*x in a bottle for me!

Strange and otherworldly... truly unique. An almond storm and lotus; that’s what greets me at first; soon drifting into plastic baby-doll head, inflatable pool toy, and a whimsical trace of anise. It’s bizarre and captivating at the same time. The drydown turns into a leathery plastic softened by a lightly salty grey ambergris, rounded with almond and a whisper of baby powder. The pairing of a sheer, mineral-leaning amber and dry cedar reminded me of the backbone of Parisian Musc. Despite the associations in its name, this is not aquatic, watery, or marine; it’s almond-forward with a soft, almost tonka-like sweetness, making it feel far more suited to autumn and winter wear. Selkies: seal-skinned shapeshifters. A Selkie poisoning her captor to escape an unwanted marriage and vanish back into the sea. This perfume tries to capture that moment; and I think it succeeds. The “leather” here is latex through a modern lens, while the almond, anise, and water-flowers conjure an atmosphere that feels both otherworldly and storybook-like. I don’t see this appealing to the masses; it smells like a narrative distilled into scent, and the combination is unusual and unconventional in the best way. What stunned me most is how it carries echoes of my two lifelong signature scents; a discovery that felt both unexpected and deeply satisfying. I won’t name them, so as not to overshadow the uniqueness of this beautiful creation. I love how it feels both nostalgic and quietly ethereal, with a faint sense of drifting in a void. Easily one of the strangest, most delightfully weird bottles in my entire collection. Tag(s): unsettling, almondy, whimsical, latex, plastic baby-doll head, otherworldly, liminal, void

As a big fan of this house I was very keen to pick this up as soon as it launched. Story telling is always such a strength of Beaufort and this fragrance is no exception. Like the others in this new line the scent is, to me, more nuanced than some of their others. Less streets of London, Victorian gothic (rake and ruin or terror and magnificence for example ) and abit more haunting. I would describe this scent as poisonous, capturing the feel of a mysterious woman lacing a man’s meal with cyanide. There is something rough and challenging here, it’s dark and unsettling whilst remaining cold. Not as green as fathom V, not as damp and cold as cape wrath, totally unique. Strong spice, almost like black licorice and seawater turned into a strangely wet musk. Every fragrance from this house captures a feeling of nostalgia for a dark time and place I haven’t been to but can see so clearly in my mind.

The bitter almond on this goes all the way up to 11. It's a note I usually like and fits with the name/concept, but in this setting, it is difficult to wear. Cannot see myself getting a bottle. The tester should last for a fair while anyway, as this fragrance does not reward overspraying.

Sirenide opens with an almond blast that instantly fills the room. It smells of bitter almonds, that same scent you get from cyanide. Over time, it softens, and the almonds are joined by watery florals, leather, and the powdery touch of iris. Despite how unusual it is, I actually find it quite wearable and office friendly. It feels melancholic and nostalgic, though at first I couldn’t figure out why. Turns out, Sirenide reminds me a lot of marzipan candies and Barbie doll heads I used to play with as a kid. UPDATE: I gave it another shot the next day thinking I would like it just like the day before, but instead the powdery-plasticky aroma of vintage dolls gave me a visceral, gag reflex inducing reaction this time. It's like thinking about that delicious dinner that made your stomach sick. Yeah, the taste was great at that moment but now your body rejects even the memory of it. This is the first time this has happened to me in the context of a perfume though. I really wish the drydown was more like the opening - more almonds, less Barbies.

Sirenide could have stumbled out of a pub down the lane from the Globe for the reek of its opening spell. Yet somehow, when the dust clears, it does not soften; instead it loses its boozy funky air for the intoxication sickness of an uber ride full of twinks on their way home from the club, fumbling over a jar of RUSH. I am fascinated by every moment of this scent, but for the sake of my sobriety I don't think i can touch it.

Not sugarcoating it, this is nauseating. Sirenide actually opens quite nicely, a floral almond scent with a shy leather note à la Eau d'Ombré Leather lingering behind the far more noticeable almond and florals. It's sweet, likeable and slightly feminine, which I think is noteworthy as all other BeauForts are either extremely masculine or potentially unisex but still somewhat masculine leaning. The scent is nice and tolerable for about five minutes, then it just becomes exhausting. This is quite potent, and it doesn't help that it's so unbearably sweet in a very synthetic and syrupy way. They may be odd and hard to wear but other BeauForts like Vi Et Armis, Tonnerre and Rake & Ruin (which I'm currently still trying on my other arm) are interesting, this is just plain obnoxious, nauseating and, in my opinion, unwearable. The only fragrance from this house I genuinely dislike and do not recommend even sampling.

I was so hopeful from the listed notes. I have never, so quickly, felt actually nauseated by the mechanical, bitter, chemical smell of a fragrance! I've sprayed onto a stick to come back to it and try and figure out what I'm actually smelling. I'm yet to pinpoint it but my husband agrees it's the worst in the discovery set by a mile. I get niche fragrances are often evoking a story or an image but this one is not for us!

The Anthropocene Curse Beaufort doesn’t simply revive the selkie myth — it drags it into the present and lets it speak the language of the Anthropocene. The plastic note isn’t a conceptual flourish. In the old tales, humans steal the selkies’ seal-skins; without that aquatic layer, they’re stranded on land, trapped in a form that isn’t theirs. Today, those stolen skins have been replaced by PVC: it’s what we’ve handed back to nature in exchange for what belonged to her. In Sirenide, the selkies poison humans in revenge. Now, revenge is redundant — we’ve poisoned ourselves. We stripped nature of its riches and paid her back with trash and synthetics, only to realise that, being part of her, the toxin loops through us too. The fragrance stages this transformation through three “skins”: • a leather skin, earthy and animalic • a human skin, salty and water-soaked • an alien skin: plastic It’s our new coating — the quiet metamorphosis of a plasticised evolution. The siren-nature is compromised, but so are we. Every wound dealt to her comes back as a curse to us. From a technical angle, the perfume blends leather notes with a tonka–star anise–licorice accord that feels both sweet and venomous. A powdery structure evokes the sea without using algae: it smells of sand, shell, and dried saltwater. The plastic element surfaces with the exact scent of a wet inflatable beach mattress. As it moves into the heart and dry-down, lotus adds a soft, soapy, almond-tinged floral quality that rounds and gentles the composition. The base ultimately settles into a sweet-saline, clean accord reminiscent of fabric softener, with strong echoes of: • Villa Lympia by Oriza L. Legrand • A Quiet Place by Yankee Candle Perhaps a good ending. A fragrance that startles at first, but then grips you so deeply you can’t do without it.

This has a strong long-lasting and forward almond scent. Perfect for when you crave a strong almond scent (so many scents maybe tease with just a touch of almond?) or if you generally love it. I think it's gorgeous in the gourmand direction without being sweet and also smells a bit dangerous. Other almond scents I'm familiar with are Fucking Fabulous by Tom Ford, Tracy by Ellen Tracy, the Zara scent MSK 004/NTL and Burberry Brit. The strong almond scent goes perfect with cyanide associations ("sirenide") since almonds contain cyanide and cyanide is supposed to smell like bitter almonds / marzipan.

Bitter almond, the seed inside the seed inside a jar, preserved in pale liquid; a melody of bioluminescence, light and song with no heat source or sound; briny sweet florals pulled under by the tide, sweetness with a mineral undertow, the bruised porcelain inside of an oyster shell; a lullaby from the uncanny valley, something soft and strange and gentle that loves you in a way you can't quite parse.

This, to me, is an example of too much of a good thing. Each note here is so good, but they’re all turned up to maximum volume, screaming over each other. That’s the point, I get it. But if beast mode fragrances ever go out of style (please, dear gawd), I’d love to see this formulated as an EDT; toned down, I’d probably buy a bottle.