Ataraxia
A Gothic Avante Garde House

Top

When sprayed, this fragrance has a strong start of sweet amaretto and cherry liquor. From the start, it is also dusty and waxy. It has a gourmand quality in a feels like it belongs below ground; different from the conventional locations one might visit on a night out. I can truly see this as being a fragrance for a jazz bar that only a select few know. An elite jazz bar, one where the elites are not the 1%, but rather some insurgency or anarchistic people that revel only at times when the music allows it.

Middle

It becomes sweeter and more almondy, but tobacco starts peeking out, and the jazz bar reaches its peak. These are the hours during which the cause is secondary to the clinking glasses and groovy music heard from the dusty couch in the corner of the room.

The fragrance is still dusty and still somewhat gourmand. I also saw that it has notes of cocoa, and I think that in the middle is where they come through. The sweetness isn’t really affected by them, but rather they introduce a certain dryness to the character of the sweetness.

Base

For the base, the perfume is more or less the same, but the notes blend together wonderfully as the night carries on into the morning hours, and in the end of the music, the on-stage trio leaves and the place quiets down, settling into the warmth and comfort of people who knew each other as comrades in cause but friends too.

I know I went in a more storytelling direction myself, but if you want the short of it, this smells like amaretto with cherries and dust, with some gourmand qualities too. It is really sweet, dense and waxy, and I would consider it one of my best winter fragrances.

Before describing the fragrance, I wanna say how cool of an idea this is for a perfume: something that smells like a dying god. Ataraxia’s explanation for this is that gods in perfume have always been depicted by metallic and atmospheric smells like ozone and aldehydes, but what if a god’s death smelled like all which it accrued in offerings and oblations throughout its lifetime? Super cool!

Top 1

It starts off smelling like plum and honey. I could also see the plum being interpreted as alcohol. It feels like a smell of childhood at this stage; something sickeningly sweet and colourful.

Top 2

After the first few seconds when the density kicks in, you really do get that image that Ataraxia was going for: a honeyed, waxy density that is supported by plums, jam, cream and some heavy tobacco (absolut probably). It feels mighty in some sense; grand even.

From the top of Deity, I can already tell that this is a very complex fragrance. I want to also say that I really love the plums. In the top notes, the airiness is the only thing saving the deep and dense waxiness and strong honey character from being overwhelming, and takes it from being negative into something that is really really nice.

So far, beautiful.

Mid

Deity becomes sweeter and lighter towards the middle: the heaviest parts have begun burning. The wax and sweet honey have now given way for the tobacco, and maybe cocoa. It is slightly milkier than before. The plum is gone.

Dry Down

Here, despite the wax and the honey, the sweetness starts being better-rounded, with what I think is vanilla, tonka, ambers, and other French perfumery classics. I can also pick up on some resins such as elemi or oppoponax, benzoin and maybe myrrh. It is difficult to ascertain anything, as the blending is really good, and the wax and tobacco tend to mask the resinous quality a little too.

A note I would like to add here to kind of finalize my opinions about this fragrance is that it smells like the colour gold, like nectar or a jar of honey illuminated by sun rays.

The writing for My Doll’s Makeup is the owner’s and has not arrived yet. Its notes are below — the house’s own account first, then the fallback’s.

If I am not wrong, this was inspired by Attack on Titan which I will contextualize here:

Spoiler alert

Spinal fluid captures the universe really well:

Firstly, there are the cold and bloody fights that happen between the Scouts corps and the titans. There is blood and the smell that would trigger one’s fight or flight response if you were to smell it. This is really interesting (understatement) and I will talk about it more in the top.

Secondly, I find myself also imagining the ways that the titan users like Eren in his Attack Titan and Armin in his Colossal Titan would emerge from their respective titans in the steam and severe heat. That facet is also present and takes part in this fragrance.

Finally, there is the spinal fluid itself, which exists as a very sterile type of smell, but to the point of downright abrasion. This is the smell of The Paths and/or the serum that Grisha injected Eren with I imagine.

Top

So here I need to make a distinction, because there are two very different fragrances that project from this. There is the outer and massively projecting and penetrating fleshy and airy note, a smell of desiccated flesh left out in the open at room temperature for a little too long; and the inner and more reserved hospital sterile note.

The outer and massively projecting meat note honestly makes me sick. It is the only fragrance I have ever smelled that made me nauseous, so good job Ataraxia. Imagine there was a murder sometime 3 days ago, and the person was left with several stab wounds bleeding them dry on some hotel room floor, with the windows open. When you would enter, there would come a draft, carrying the smell of dead semi-old flesh on a breeze, and that is what this smells like: it has that cold character of a smell being carried by a gust of wind, whilst still being a smell of old disconcerting meat.

The inner smell is one I have a story about. I was once visiting the internal medicine department at an eastern European hospital, and in that department, I passed by a room of end of life care patients. Those are rooms that are generally quite sad: they house patients whose condition has deteriorated to the point where the doctors can do no more than ease their symptoms. In this room, there were 4 patients, 3 of which had dementia and some other psychiatric problems. Some of these patients were even tied to the hospital beds in fear of the fact that they might hurt themselves. Within this room, everything was white and everything was still. The ventilation shafts were closed; there was no movement asides from a few futile attempts to turn over; and the only thing showing any form of time moving on was the mechanism by the patients that dropped their drugs into their IV line drop by drop. This room was awful, and it smelled like a sterile end, like the white light you see at the end of your life. It was the smell of death in its whitest and most blinding form.

That is what this fragrance smells like.

It smells bright but so penetrating. It has a smell that is so fresh but does not induce any trigeminal activation.

It is genuinely sickening.

Mid

In the middle, that atmospheric haze of meat still remains quite present.

The dense smell that is close to the paper is spicy somehow; im getting cumin maybe and something salty. It’s still awful.

When I smell it now I imagine a boxing ring.

Dry down

Meat, and cumin. That’s what this smells like. Despite that though, it is still bright somehow, with that medicinal smell to it.

0/10, would smell again.

Top

Absolutely brilliant, this one. It starts off smelling like one of those spicy Lindt chocolate bars, but way more nuanced. I can also see this as being some communist candy your grandma might have given you if you lived somewhere in the far Eastern Bloc in the 70s.

There is sweetness, cocoa or chocolate, and then the spiciness of some very strong pepper (the smell of something absolutely drenched in capsaicin).

It smells phenomenal.

Middle

In the middle, it maintains the chocolaty quality but the wasabi and spices are going to start protruding more and more. They will give it a more powdery feeling and try to turn the chocolate into more of a chocolate powder.

Base

This part here starts smelling exactly what I imagine the pool in Chernobyl would smell like. You know the one, the Басейн Лазурний (Azure Swimming Pool) in Pripyat. The chocolate and sweetness slowly dissipates, and the spiciness and capsaicin quality take on the scent of what I imagine radiation would smell like if it had a smell, and the rest of it really does emphasize that atmosphere of an abandoned exclusion zone.

Despite all that, I do think this is very wearable, especially in the winter.