Dzing!

I've never been much of a fan of sweet oriental perfumes. It's not that I don't care for the smell of vanilla--who doesn't love the smell of a sticky black vanilla bean?--but that personal fragrances based on those notes have a weird way of making something deep within me recoil and flinch away from them. Perhaps I was simply far too traumatized by the 1980s. I lived in New York City at the height of the loud orientals era, you see, and I commuted to work by subway. By RUSH HOUR subway. So as hesitant as I am to draw the ire of the perfumistas by admitting this, I was indeed one of those people who heaved a giant sigh of olfactory relief in the 1990s, when all of those new cool quiet "fresh and clean" aquatics finally replaced the deafeningly loud warm-spicy-yet-also-sickly-sweet-and-don't-forget-the-absolutely-*filthy*-come-hither-animalics! melange as the prevailing smell of the crowded morning subway car. I know, I know. I'm so sorry. Anyway, the point is that I didn't really expect to care all that much for Dzing! As far as I could tell, it looked to be a warm, spicy, candy-sweet, vanillic gourmandish yet also kinda fecal-filthy oriental. All of the things that I thought I didn't care for in a fragrance. But then I gave it a sniff. And then another. And then another...and another...and another... And then, only a week after my first whiff of Dzing!, I had somehow managed not only to use up my entire sample, but also to shell out more money than I thought I would ever be willing to pay for 100 mls, just to have a great big stonking bottle of this for my very own. I just couldn't help myself. I simply had to, you see, because this remarkably addictive fragrance smells like so many of the very best things on earth: of well-kept stables and tack rooms and warm sweet hay, of a healthy horse's neck when you nuzzle it after a good day's ride and the way that your palms smell after that same day of riding (the leather of the reins combining with your sweat and the fine fresh horse sweat to make something new and strange out of the once-familiar skin-smell of your own two hands). It smells of fresh-cut pine boards, ancient varnish, the tasty salicylated green inner layer of black birch bark; of sarsaparilla and sealing wax; of the inside of a lacquered Chinese false-bottomed box. It's the smell of schoolbook covers made from brown paper grocery bags and decorated with thick and redolent permanent markers, and of the enormous cardboard refrigerator box your parents let you play in when you were very small. It's all of the good smells of childhood and none of the bad: it's fatwood and toffee and that fried dough with powdered sugar they sell at the state fair. It's that funny brown benzoin your grandmother once dabbed on your scraped knee to make a bandaid stick better -- and it's also the weirdly rubbery old bandaid itself. It's dusty boxes in the attic, a forgotten cake of rosin found inside a velvet-lined antique violin case, shelves upon shelves of old used books, the fur behind the ears of a sun-warmed purring cat... It's all of these olfactory memories at once, and yet it doesn't...quite...match any one of them perfectly. It somehow manages to be both intensely allusive and profoundly nostalgic, while never quite settling on any single precise referent. And in the end, of course, like all the best fragrances, Dzing! smells like nothing but its own unique self. I am absolutely, head-over-heels in love with this fragrance, but the thing is, I can also recognize that many of the reasons others have given for finding it gross are pretty much accurate. There *is* a fecal aspect to the smell of even the best-maintained stable, and while I may find that tang of well-aged horse manure to be not only inoffensive but even actively enjoyable, I can certainly understand why someone else might be violently averse to the idea of deliberately scenting themselves with it. Cat fur, similarly, is not a smell that everyone enjoys, nor is attic dust, and I am sure that there are many for whom the words "horse sweat" do not precisely ring out as a positive endorsement of a ladies' perfume (especially since, as my mother always told me, while horses are lucky enough to be permitted to sweat, and gentlemen may perspire, ladies must never do anything more than "glow"). And though I've always loved the turpentinic smell of rosin, I've never heard of anyone rubbing it all over themselves in a futile attempt at budget DIY perfumery -- unlike, say, vanilla extract from the kitchen, which very many young people do try to use in just that way. So yeah, I get what others might find disgusting about Dzing!. Honestly, I really, really do get it. But to me, it is just hauntingly beautiful.

Descriptions of this perfume are so wild and varied that I've had it on my radar for years. So once I finally got a sample, it had a lot to live up to. I didn't really know what to make of this at first, because I think I was a little confused. The circus backstory and abundance of sweet notes made me expect something like Angel, but I don't get much in the realm of sweetness. The leather is definitely more prominent than anything else, but it's a funky, smoky leather. That might make it sound a little macho and intimidating, but there's nothing scary about this. Dzing is cozy as hell. I didn't know how wearable this was at first, but I find myself reaching for this sample a lot. I completely get the hype. This is a really unique perfume, but it's not at all as weird as people say it is. I don't smell the inside of a circus, but I can perfectly picture the autumnal countryside where it's happening, crunchy leaves and all. It smells like a childhood drive to the exurbs for seasonal activities like moonlit hay rides and haunted houses. There's something a little scary about being in the middle of nowhere on a dark night, because you have no idea how far you are from home, or how you got there. Despite your nerves, your family's right there, and they're having fun with you, so it's an exciting kind of scary. You're learning how it feels to be outside of city limits, and to go on an adventure with people you love. It makes you look forward to the independence of getting older, but you're having a great time just being a kid, especially on nights like this. You have a fun grandpa who makes you feel smart and special, and he's always happy to do kid stuff with you. He smells like tobacco and dusty books, and you always take an extra deep inhale when you hug him. This is just so evocative and comfortable. It smells old, but in this endearing, lived-in way, exactly how you'd want something to smell old. It smells like a safe, eccentric older man who will tell you great stories if you ask him. It also smells like walking into the kind of antique bookstores that used to feel ordinary enough, but are now so threatened by late capitalism that even seeing one feels like urgently good news. It makes me understand why people want to smell like old books. It feels like it's motivated by a desire to remember a past where the future felt safe, and guaranteed. Look at all these old things that survived, because people loved and protected them. Dzing doesn’t evolve much on my skin, and I can't really find the sweet notes, but where it lands is so nice that I don’t care. I can imagine this being wearable all year, but the comfort I feel wearing this is so perfect for the cold seasons. It smells like happy memories that aren’t even necessarily mine, but it makes me feel loved and happy to be alive. These are very lonely times, so I think it's really beautiful that a perfume can conjure up that kind of emotional warmth. I imagine I’ll be reaching for this a lot in the next several months.

Beautiful. Love at first sniff. I will just confirm what others have already said: it's a (pretty clean) cowshed (or call it as you want, a zoo or circus cage) with a hint of sweetness in the background. This fragrance is quite linear, but unique. The opening is an slightly animalistic musk, leaning slightly masculine. That said, I agree with @suskind66 that this is NOT a challenging fragrance, and should please pretty much anyone who doesn't limit her/his shopping habits to generic mass-appealing fragrances. There is NO skanky/urine note (i.e. YSL Kouros, Serge Lutens Muscs Koublai Khan or Le Labo Oud 27). Also, NO fecal/dung note like in some indian oud containing fragrances (i.e. Frederic Malle The Night). Sure, it has a cowshed vibe, but a very clean one. After 15/30min, the drydown opens on a leather note, supported by a nearly feminine floral background (I would have bet on turkish rose, but it's not listed in the pyramid). It will stay pretty linear until the end (not a criticism). That said the "cotton candy" and "candy apple" hype is a pure marketing thing to tell the circus story. Honestly, on my skin I cannot perceive and describe these notes more precisely than "florals with a light gourmand note". Overall a quite perfect unisex fragrance (ok... maybe 51% feminine/ 49% masculine... but as a man I love it, despite I am not the metrosexual type at all) This is a unique and beautiful creation, the definition of niche perfumery (in terms of scent). That said I cannot ignore a major drawback here: this one has just a soft projection in the early opening, and then settles as a skin scent shortly after. Because of that, it misses the "masterpiece title", but thanks to that, this is the only animalic musk fragrance I know that could be worn at work. It's definitely a love for me and would recommend getting a decant, or possibly a full bottle, but only if you can find it discounted (I blind bought mine new at less than $50 for 100ml). While I love the scent, personnally I would not have paid full retail price given the poor performance. Best for mildly cold/warm weather days (Spring/Fall), for both women (20+) and men(30+). (women may also try to wear this one in warmer evenings, imo) Merci Madame Giacobetti (for the unique scent - not the performance!) Edit: I acquired Aperture by Ulrich Lang a year later or so,and the similarities between these two are obvious and strong. Basically Aperture is mostly the heart stage of Dzing with additional aldehydes in the top and ambergris in the base, keeping it colder. As opposed to Dzing!, that will round the edge of the musk with some sweetness in the background.

What a wily minx this creature is; I have read and listened to many of the epithets attributing sources as diverse as dung, old books, the circus, an evening in the tropics and sawdust, and with my curiosity aroused by such diverse opinions I got a decant from someone with the dark green bottle. Everyone raves about the old bottle with the lady and tiger but I had to make do, and boy was I not disappointed. Dzing! for me is onomatopoeiacally perfect, because a personal experience of running at night through humid tropical nature reserves literally comes Dzinging back to me - my nostrils are clear from heavy breathing, and the air is viscous with the scent of the night-blooming Indian Pulai tree and an overripe, fecund odour of trampled fallen flowers and fruit underfoot. It is a strangely spicy, insolent smell, too pointed to be purely of plant origin, and I reckon only vegetal decomposition on the steaming equator can smell quite like that. Amazingly, apart from the saffron note, there is no other flower officially listed, and yet, this begins for me not with leather, but with a wonderful narcotic white floral with a veil of nutmeg and possibly pandan leaf floating over it, giving it a surprisingly tantalising Southeast-asian gourmand quality, and I can only marvel at the alchemical transmutation going on with the ingredients in Dzing! To bring this about. This mellows down after maybe an hour or so in the crook of my arm (or sooner on my wrist) to a comforting savoury buttery leather, like being ensconced in a worn button-back armchair frequently occupied by a handsome man (or perhaps a woman) with a habit of lounging about, naked and unshowered, skin in direct contact with the leather. In an ideal world this is what humans might naturally smell like; perhaps our loved ones already do in a way... I cannot help but think of the scene in Tom Ford’s A Single Man where George, the grieving English professor puts his head through a stranger’s car window to wistfully inhale the fragrance of her smooth fox terrier, a comforting reminder of his own deceased pet, which he rhapsodises, ‘smell like buttered toast’. The fact that that line or scene was never actually in Isherwood’s original novel, and that Ford’s own fox terriers starred in the movie itself, bestows the ‘buttered toast’ quote with a rather powerful intimate significance.

Joyous leather! Have you never smelled leather that’s full of joy, fun, and happiness? Smell Dzing!. In terms of structure and high-level characteristics, Dzing! is actually fairly routine. It wasn’t the first put a fruit note over leather, and it wasn’t the first - even of that aforementioned set - to go down a slightly sweet faux-gourmand route either. Dzing! stands out amongst the pack by paying attention to the details that make the creative brief come to light, that is the smell of a circus. The opening, at least for me, is an instant smile. Red Washington apples flecked with caramel overlaying black polished leather. Of course in literary description that doesn’t sound like the type of thing that should work but olfactorily it works brilliantly - and has in many forms before Dzing!. It’s happy and it’s fun thanks to the tastefully fruity and sweet apple and caramel but the leather lends itself to the message as well by being properly leathery animalic but far from any sort of skank-fest. As the perfume evolves it becomes clearer as to why: Giacobetti performed a neat circus trick by linking the leather over the top over animalic musks, vanilla, and bright and slightly smoky woods - not placing the leather in the base. Without a funky castoreum or styrax or birch smoke base feeding the leather note, Dzing! manages to give a sweet circus treat closure that reminds me of powder-sugar sprinkled fried funnel cakes and cotton candy. The end of the perfume is not nearly as sweet as those descriptions would lead to you think, it’s actually quite understated and tasteful. This should come as no surprise since Giacobetti is the queen of quiet, finely detailed yet powerful-statement perfumes. I’m a sucker for a great leather perfume, as any of you who have followed me for some time are well aware - and I own a lot of them. Despite its conventional structure it’s those fine details Giacobetti pays attention to that call-back Dzing! to my mind time and time again when I think about the great leather perfumes of the last 30 odd or so years. It’s just such a shame it’s gone... much like circuses, I suppose. Though circuses disappeared for well-principled reasons. Dzing! disappeared because... well... you’d have to ask Puig and L’AP but their reasons are likely to be less principled.