Intriguing, hard to place & slightly spooky

This scent is hard to nail down — sort of foggy, like cold dusk on a forest lake. It’s fresh, but not light, green but not bright, atmospheric & ozonic but not at all metallic or synthetic-smelling, faintly sweet, camphorous & spooky. Plus, when you get a tiny bit of distance from the scent, you get an almost hollow, ozonic mint after-scent that I find fascinating.

If you’ve tried Grand Soir (Maison Kurkdjian) before, it has that same slightly minty/camphorous edge to the edges of its projection (weird, considering their vastly different compositions). There’s certainly more earthiness & deep, dark green to Mistpouffer, though. I’m putting this down to the combination of pine, smoke, malt sugar & cypriol, which oddly combines to resemble the lavender, cedar & benzoin of GS (though that’s just conjecture).

The watchword here is “intriguing”. The description Stora Skuggan has for this scent leans towards the mythic & for me, feels more light than this scent. To me, this fragrance sits darker & greener, like a misty, drizzly day deep in the darkly verdant mountains with deep grey smudges for a sky & shadows lurking in the corners — little haunted, but I kind of love that about it. It feels like seeing a pale figure in the distance across dark water & fog.

As the dry down truly sets in (around 6 hours in), the camphorous, almost-minty pine notes give way to a sweet, slightly astringent base that’s almost reminiscent of old-fashioned brown creaming soda (likely thanks to the combination of malt sugar & cypriol notes). There’s a light, slightly bitter herbiness to it, though, that stops this scent from steering into gourmand territory.

I wish this scent were more attainable. It’s a work of art.