Copal Azur by Aedes de Venustas

by: Elena Vosnaki

"The only trouble with anchors is that they can grow roots! We need the still point of rest and restoration that our anchor offers, but we also need to be able to let go of the mooring and set sail again. We must let go of every signpost and journey on. We cannot be 'established.'"—Margaret Silk

Perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour is renowned for engaging the mind even more than the nostrils, getting you to think out of the box and putting new associations into unlikely combinations that transcend from the sensual into the spiritual. How can a strictly indoors smell, that of burning incense, so tied to wooden pegs and tight clusters of people, gain an outdoorsy veneer? The French perfume school has long thrived on the exploration of indoor scents; from the culinary scents of hot butter, peachy and plummy compotes and pain d'épices fused into classic chypres and orientals, to the introspective scents of the church and the literary salon, full of incense, beeswax and the scent of the paper-knife between paper leaves, the ink that dots the pages ... These reflect the traditions that have built France's reputation as the seat of good food and decent banter. But the great outdoors, a less Parisian perhaps, yet not entirely distant destination, was left uncharted right till the bucolic greeneries introduced withVent Vert and the athletic agility of the 1990s marines. And then the outdoors came sweeping one day, sailing on.

"Marine, you say?"  I can almost see you shudder with the pragmatic disgust that two decades of disenchantment with anything "blue" or "sporty" in the fragrance world have uploaded upon you. But not all marines are created equal and what has become a tired trope can be overcome by deft and imaginative shreds into the fabric of habit.Copal Azur isn't strictly a marine, nor is it a straight incense.

Composed by the high priest of incense perfume (Duchaufour is responsible for the spectacularly authentic Avignon despite its lack of actual frankincense, the beguilingly "muddy" Timbuktu as well as Aedes de Venustas original eponymous release from 2012 and has roughly a 1 to 4 ratio of incense to other styles output), Copal Azur, as attested by the name, is an incense fragrance inspired by copal, the resin of the Mayans and Aztecs. It is shot with a powerful dosage of "blue," too, reflected in its beautiful bottle, and maybe for that reason leaning more into the masculine than the traditionally thought of as feminine. As copal cannot enter the composition of fine fragrance, the perfumer is left with the option of creating an illusion via allusion, incorporating three different extracts, built into chords with other ingredients that mimic the ambience of the copal resin.

Usually incense scents rely more on the familiar smokiness of burnt incense (odd and complex things happen when things burn) instead of the cold material, but in order to temper the smokiness perfumers use citral, a lemony note to balance it out, a natural facet of frankincense resin after all. Duchaufour seems to do that here as well (a touch of orange to tie with the myrrh, too, and the bittersweet note of tonka to give a friendly touch), though the citrus impression is subtle and contributes to the overall freshness more than an individual "note."

In this particular highly "terpenic" Aedes de Venustas fragrance Duchaufour seems to echo most closely the unusual and resolutely contemporary effects for which a coterie of creators, Mark Buxton and Jean Claude Ellena among them, is best known for: bone dry and gauze-like compositions that are inspired by de facto heavy materials. How is this possible? Sleight of hand, imaginative thinking, magic, you can take your pick, it doesn't really matter unless you're trying to copy it for your perfumery class.

The most startling observation however is how Copal Azur strikes me as kin to the infamous Sécrétions Magnifiques by Etat Libre d'Orange. The statement alone might scare the horses, but hold them down a bit. Where Sécrétions was meant to come all out and pounce with the surgical steel of a ruthless surgeon on the jugular in a just bleached hospital room, Copal Azur takes that odd aqueous, iodine note of the former (Azurone) and weaves it with cardamom and some patchouli plus the familiar bittersweet facet of myrrh resin to render something quite different than all other incenses. And it all makes sense, all of a sudden, doesn't it?

Azur means "blue," hence Cote d'Azur, and there's this expanse of deep blue reflecting the sea which lies at the edge of one's consciousness, of one's bond with eternity, of eternal motion, of infinity, of an at once detachment from humanity and of its embracing it at the very core. The lack of the liturgical is traded here for a different, less ritualized spirituality, shedding the canonical of Avignon for the spirituality of a different sort of piety, which I sense is deeply personal to Bertrand himself. It may well be the closest thing an agnostic has to sharing the communal olfactory impression of mass. A mass of the sea and the earth and of the spirit that lives and breathes in each of us.