Source

Recently started working my way through samples of the Vallense fragrances. Spirit is my favorite but Source is really interesting if not the kind of thing I'd normally wear. It's a nutty-vetiver-gourmand oud with a rose accent. There's a sweet, rich praline effect that runs through the whole fragrance, and the rose has a soft velvet quality. The oud is not overpowering and full of those harsh woody-amber materials you smell in most oud fragrances. I'd describe it mostly as a vetiver forward oud, with a hint of rose, rather than a traditional rose-oud. The resins are present but not dominant.

So this composition, predominantly smells of frankinsense and benzoin to me. Not in the way that you might think, sharply sweet, but earthy and ‘churchy’ like an Avignon type thing...nor is it an ‘amber’ as such, a world apart from that infact. This is not sharp at all but I think if you’re familiar with these kinds of resin materials you’ll recognise this non atypical signature. The rest is almost a creamy, hand cream, nutty vetiver, with an excellent lightly smoky effect layered in. In many ways this feels indy and clumpy, not very refined, yet its complexity and prominent naturalism in its materials make me inherently really like it. I’m morbidly interested in its facets and it wears really nicely but it’s far from a pretty or elegant perfume. Noticed it goes on in a kind of slick of grease on my skin, which I don’t like but generally it’s better than anything I could ever make, yet it’s still reminscent of my own naive, perfumery fumblings.

A nocturnal glamour-cryptid, cloaked in its own velvety wings, its vast buggy eyes like antique opera glasses. It lives in cultivated dark, manicured parks behind concert halls, the shadowed side of a fountain, topiaries at midnight. It has a taste for finer things and knows where to find them. You didn't know it was on the guest list, but here you both are! Mossy and ambery and peppery, with a resinous sweetness that reads less like dessert than like the filling of some abstract turnover made with dry grasses and syrupy saps, ground and sweetened acorns bound together in something dark and flaking. Rich and musky-dry, slithery, a lurker. It unfolds slowly next to you on the bench, vast wings spreading, obscuring the moon, eyes enormous and unblinking. It means you no harm. It is simply drawn to the same things you are. It will have what you're having.