Spirit

Spirit is my favourite of the Vallense debut trio. Typically I'm not into mint in fragrance, but in Spirit it brings a cool type of freshness to this woody-petrichor character that the fragrance is mostly about. It smells like driving along one of those roads surrounded by trees when the sun has come out after the rain, and the rain starts to evaporate off the tarmac and the forest. It's got this crisp-mulchy-woody thing going on, maybe like oak wood and damp leaves, but the sun is bright. It makes me happy.

Challenging/terrible opening. I like ‘clean’ outrageously soapy and bracing effects, white musk and so forth so if you’re offending me with similar then it must be bad. I feel the style of this is ‘Italian’ in a loose sense. Spirit is too much. It’s unpleasant. Cool and mildly green, I want to say geranium but I like geranium. For 15-20 minutes or so. Then it starts to get a sort of floracy which I can start to get behind, then in the deep, deep, drydown (many hours later) it becomes something I’d actively say I enjoy. A real tale of two halves, which unfortunately for me equates to a bad/not to my taste perfume. Again this seems crude like source, I’d actually say sun is probably the most refined but they all come off indy, and that’s because they are! But... I crave more for in excess of 200 quid a bottle.