Amarena

A cherry lollipop and a lot of patchouli. At first I really didn’t like it; I found the cherry artificial and the patchouli overwhelming. And yet something drew me in, I found I wanted to keep smelling it. I don’t think it’s my perfume but it’s definitely a fun fragrance that stands out from the sea of Lost Cherry dupes that have spawned in the past couple of years.

There are fragrances that speak the language of the market, of trends, of emotional throwaway culture. And then there is AMARENA, which seems to arrive from another olfactory dimension, more brutal, more honest. The initial impact is a cherry with nothing playful about it: dark, dense, almost overexcited. It sits halfway between the childhood of sugar and the adulthood of desire. Then you realize that this fragrance is built with such an absurd amount of natural raw materials that it almost feels like a political act: an extreme overdose of raw patchouli, ylang-ylang pushed to its limit, supercritical CO2 extraction of three varieties of ancient roses, hand-picked in Liguria’s gardens and usually used to make a syrup now recognized as a Slow Food heritage product. AMARENA is sensual, profound, a manifesto against mediocrity. And each time you smell it, you understand a little better why.