Vio Volta

Call me crazy; I LOVE IT. I get a slight astringent note, which I think might be the cat piss smell people are picking up on. But much like another reviewer mentioned, I can't stop sniffing it. I get a full-bodied earthy green violet and find it's paired perfectly with the more synthetic mineral notes of electricity. It feels like walking through the damp, mossy forests in British Columbia in a cozy fleece sweater.

Honestly, I don’t care what anyone says; I love this so much. Like chewing on Parma violets next to an electrical fire.

If you hate this perfume you’re boring. Sorry I don’t make the rules.

Have I entered a parallel universe? Is this fragrance going to dramatically transform on contact with my skin and become this gross abomination that pretty much every review here agrees that it is? Now this is hasty and premature of me to offer a proper review without doing so, spraying it on a card as I have done. Let me go massively against the grain here and say that this is reminiscent of Christian Dior Fahrenheit but with drier more overt IES tones and parched ionones which mutate into a modern leather and faint diesel fume accord. This is par for the Durga course for me, uncompromising yet trendy and modern. I get the tartness of rhubarb in the opening and I think that pairs well with violet. I will update this review when I’ve warn this one but I thought it was pretty good, not earth shattering, but not quite derivative either.

I sort of get why this scent elicits such strong reactions, but I think it has its merits. It's even wearable in its way. I imagine that this is what the fictional "devil's plant" tannis root from Rosemary's Baby would smell like. Vio Volta is vegetal in a way that teeters on ugly - bitter, earthy, peppery, intense, sharp, maybe slightly evil. The fact that it smells like a pungent, unknown herb is responsible for its uncanny, somewhat disturbing quality. Is it edible? Poisonous? Something to ward off vampires? Who can say? All this is to say that it's disconcertingly unfamiliar, but it's not a bad scent. I don't get cat urine at all; to my nose this is all vegetable and mineral, no animal. It's just an idiosyncratic Day of the Triffids-eqsque alien-plant.