Pilgrim

Completely unexpectedly, this is not only my favourite from a bunch of Chapel Factory perfumes I sampled, but also one of my favourite things I’ve EVER smelled. It’s giving five thousand year old mermaid who converted to Catholicism. It’s giving church pews that have been flooded with sea water countless times. It smells ancient and magical, religious beyond a human life span, and slightly feral. It manages to be timeless and transcendent but also very much of the earth (rather, of the sea) at the same time. If your favourite religious/ mythological figures are John the Baptist, Shiva and Enkidu, you’ll appreciate this perfume a lot. The opening is intense and heavier on the marine side, but as it settles the more calm and churchy side takes centre stage. Longevity is good, I can still notice it at the end of the day, and it seems to have a lighter, almost playful energy then that I also really enjoy. I feel like there’s two categories for perfumes I like: 1) perfumes that smell nice and beautiful, pleasant and inviting, that are worn for and appreciated by other people- to connect with the outside world and others, and draw them towards you. 2) perfumes that you wear to envelop yourself in an aura, to create a protective boundary filled with a strength, beauty and focus of your own choice. For me, Pilgrim is the ultimate example of the second category.

i feel like all my tears are now in a bottle melted with some incense and i think it's amazing very dry and salty scent (makes me oddly thirsty) ; it's giving earthy mystical ocean, we walk from a sad and lonely forest to a path of sand paved with drying seaweeds and crushed bigorneaux, probably while recitating l'apocalypse selon Saint-Jean en latin i 100% get the story of the pilgrim on his way to the Mont-Saint-Michel not suitable for anyone, very unique (i didn't know i was looking for that but now i do) edit: very "Les Chants de Maldoror" de Lautréamont ma star pages 35-36 kind of shit

on me the marine notes are present but tamed by the religious incense notes surrounding them. erwan roussel who co created this with anais biguine said he was inspired by his natal bretagne & mont saint-michel. i am excited to bring my sample with me while i walk along le sentier des douaniers this spring <3

Finally a truly acurate sea/ocean perfume. Unfortunetly the insence DNA of this brand turns into a fish note in humid weather so i will need to wait until summer to enjoy it.

Top incense essence, Cade wood, silt, algae, ambergris & leather. Middle Brown Algae, Maritima Base Ambergris, moss, leather 🌫️ This smells of pure seawater. The requisite chapel factory incense note is labeled “incense essence” for this release because it’s nearly undetectable. The Cade wood, silt, algae & leather come to the front on my skin. It’s smells as if I washed up on a cold northern Atlantic beach. As a pilgrim would. 🐚 Totally successful in its execution and story telling... but not a safe blind buy. I find it to be cold, metallic and “masculine” leaning. I do like it. As with most scents the more I wear it the more I’ll grow accustomed to it. IMHO the dryness & salinity make a great base for experimental layering. But I’m a freak who blind buys ocean water perfume based on typography & storytelling.

I was looking for something really salty/marine but in a moody, Normandie way. Something that smells like the Atlantic Ocean but all the other perfumes I found smelled a bit too much like oysters to me. Not this one. It's salty and cold and it does smell like seaweed, silt, rocks, a rainy afternoon on the French West Coast in a good way. I am really pleasantly surprised by how well it performs on the skin, I can still smell it after a full day and the dry down is nice, with the incense note which brings that spiritual, sacred spirit that the name evokes. For 100€ it's a super good perfume, really atmospheric and good at telling its story.

Dusty pews, delicate antique lace, stained glass sunbeams on the wooden floor, cliffside mausoleum over looking the sea.

Opens extremely repulsive. Smells like rotting meat in a mildewy puddle. Really, really, pungent. If someone smelled like this I would think they were experiencing some sort of obscure medical emergency that had them producing some truly putrescent metabolites.

I was so excited for this one but I cannot shake the heavy body odor note. I love marine fragrances but this one just smells like meat gone bad :(

Ozone, seaweed and a whisper of incense which helps cut through the ozone becoming too much which is what made me sadly sell my Vento Forte bottle from Fillipo Sorcinelli. This is everything I wanted Vento Forte to be because I adored that bottle design but I am very happy to have a variant that I actually can wear. I will still need to layer this one and I will probably be doing that with my 'Sea of Gray' or 'Gulf Breeze' Roller Oils from Solstice scents to get a really hard-core 'swimming in a rock pool that's a bit dank' vibe (another one of my favourite scent vibes) or 'After the rain' (Solstice Scents) 'Tempestarii' (Andromedas Curse) for an Electric ozonic heavy thunderstorm vibe. I blind bought this (honestly it was worth it to support the Pisse-Vinegaire collab and for the bottle) and I was worried about the leather note but it isn't noticeable (Thank god!). It truly is first and foremost ozonic with a iodiney-seaweedy-salty experience and I can't smell the incense but I love incense and I think that is why I can handle this amount of ozone. This is similiar to my bottle of 'Dead Air' by oddity but with a 'sea-like' twist and they look gorgeous sitting by side and these are both fun ones to layer with to smell truly unusual.

I'm intrigued enough to give this a full wear through my sample, but that piercing cetalox/ambroxan material is hard to ignore and I'm surprised how prevalent it is. Could mistake it for Another 13 with that hot-metal like detergent aroma. I think the salt accord mixes nicely with that but every other note seems quiet and obscured. I get a bit of briny seawater that I enjoy, maybe some moss....will have to test it like I said but I'm surprised it went this direction. Almost obnoxious that I keep smelling it after mistakenly spraying my tester strip in my bedroom.

Pilgrim is an intensely salty, marine fragrance - capturing the raw and physical elements of a body of water. It smells like sweat soaked skin meeting the sea, immediately calling to mind Saint John the Baptist as he appears in Orthodox icons: scruffy, ascetic. A wilderness prophet. This is how I imagine he would smell. Salt crushed skin, damp fabric, algae and seaweed clinging after wading through the Jordan. There's something uncompromising and elemental about it. Not for me, but the vision of a pilgrim is vivid and unwavering.

it smells good!! definitely suuuperrr marine - it smells like walking along the beach after a ton of seaweed has washed up on the shore. It's too masculine for my taste, but I gave my decant to my dad and he loves it so do w that what you will.