Ajedrez

One of the most perfect and radiant iris scents I’ve ever smelled. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Love the tender aromatic freshness and airy yet slightly waxy iris on a beautiful dry tobacco base. Beautifully crafted!! My ig: scent.guide

A hike through the dusty, sagebrush-filled foothills of Idaho on a hot summer day. This fragrance is so evocative and melds gently with the skin. It is comforting and calming. Bravo!

Highly polished mahogany library with a tufted leather couch, touched by fine dust and tobacco. Stately and cozy.

It’s a warm fall evening in 1960, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Off of a paved street and down a broken alleyway is the entrance to an old club for local gentlemen of a ripe age. Not much more than wine, gin, and coffee are served. The establishment has been standing for decades, made mostly of wood and what little brick and stone could have been afforded. The wood furniture is nearly as old, evidenced by the lacquer worn off the seats in buttock shaped swaths. The few lights on the ceiling and the walls are dim; the electricity supply to the city has been dodgy ever since the military coup over Juan Peron - not that it was much better before then - and electrical work is an expensive luxury. You can almost see the black soot stains from the oil lamps that burned in the not-so-many decades past. In the front of the club are benches and tables with the gentile reading periodicals and books, sipping away, smoking cigars or pipes or cigarettes, keeping conversations low. It was always a good idea to speak in hushed voices in Argentina in those days, just in case, and here they did so for another reason: the gentlemen at the back are playing chess. One fellow is sitting at a table alone, flanked by others with chess duals in progress. He waits for his partner as he goes about setting up the board. He likes this little club. It’s quiet and the patrons are well behaved. He likes the smell of the wood furniture and the wood walls and ceilings. They’ve absorbed a lot of odors over the years, mostly the smoldering tobacco, quite a bit of damp mustiness, and some of the floral and grassy dust that blows down Buenos Aires streets from the pampas that surrounds it. He could smell his sparring partner before he saw him. Amidst the smell of tobaccos and woods is a dusty breeze coming through the front door of the club carrying his partner’s aftershave of bergamot zest, herbal and oily lavender, and spices. He always gets a fresh shave and a wash before their weekly chess game. After greetings and a brief catch-up, they start moving pieces around the board. A man new to the club walks up to their table and asks if he can watch, and he’s permitted. The stranger is curious about this club and this popular game of chess. For the new potential patron hours go by where the smells of tobacco, woods, and one of the men’s spicy lavender aftershave don’t move or change - lingering in the air by eternal suspension. The chess pieces and their movements begin to blur together, one hardly distinguishable from the other. How does one gracefully exit, he asks himself, not wanting to be rude or interruptive. He is in danger of nodding off from being quite bored.

Ajedrez smells like perfection. However, I must clarify, perfection isn't all that its cracked up to be. It makes me think of all the many times I've claimed that a fragrance smells so "balanced" that over time, a certain cynicism had set in and I had to question my usage of such a term without any basis. What does it mean exactly for a fragrance to smell balanced besides believing that everything is in its rightful place in the just the right quantity, volume, and so forth. Gestalt is all fine and good, but sometimes a composition just has it too down pat. This doesn't excite me or evoke anything inside me purely because everything is colored within the lines and all the elements are complementary. The spices don't assert as they would in a Lorenzo Villoresi or Serge Lutens, they are polite. The lavender and bergamot is clean and well-mannered, to a fault, as if they both need to just get laid. The tobacco is not too dry, not too damp—it's Goldilocks, but I crave more severity lately. And the orris accord, again, same deal, very commercial, which is exactly why this is being compared to the Dior Hommes. It follows its orders and commits to being "nice." As Morrissey sang in his Disappointed: "Don't talk to me about people who (perfumes that) are nice, 'cause I've spent my whole life in ruins over people who (perfumes that) are nice."