by: Serguey Borisov
Maria Candida Gentile is an amazing woman. She takes full advantage of her position as an independent perfumer for the benefit of her own brand – you never know what perfume she will come up with next.
Over the years she launched, just to name a few, the gardenia scent Lady Day, based on the favorite flower of Billie Holiday, three fig perfumes in de collection “Flight of the Bumblebee”, Leucò, Kitrea and Syconium, and the wormwood and lavender composition Barry Lindon, recalling landscapes from the eponymous Kubrick movie. And this September, Maria Candida Gentile has launched something wondrous: a pink elephant from a children's movie.
The new edition Elephant & Roses is a hybrid of pachyderm animals and delicate petals, a mixture of animalistic gray, fresh green and soft pink accords. The image of an elephant stomping over a field of blossoming roses came to her when she was working on a certain animalistic chord, trying to recreate the actual smell of an elephant. That's when the miracle happened; she saw in a daydream a huge gray elephant running through a rose field, trampling bright fuchsia roses and spreading an aromatic wave of crushed roses mixed with the smell of running animals. So she combined those two formulas - the animalic formula and a rose formula (based on English and Turkish roses) – and tested the mix on her body. Mary realized instantly that she had found the desired perfume.
The official description never mentions the head notes of the fragrance – and they are really important, because the start is beautiful and quite different from the scent of both roses and animalic accords. The start is based on aromatic herbs; it's like a blossoming rose field is surrounded by hills of blue lavender, gray-green sage and fragrant thyme – and the elephants trampled those properly before they started to stomp over the rose bushes...This nice, transparent start links the grassy bitterness of thyme and lavender with a sweet floral bouquet.
The aromatic, bitter part reminds me somehow of my favorite of Maria's line, Barry Lyndon (which means I enjoy this part). Sweet flowers – fresh rose and leathery sweet osmanthus – start gradually manifesting themselves through the green energy of herbs. They solemnly go hand in hand with the greenery, causing the most pleasant feeling – and the transition from herbs to flowers is so elegant that it smells more like a chord of green tea than a bright rose oil.
After an hour or two, costus starts to reign (the same, but much more intense smell of greasy hair and wool that you can detect in tuberose) – maybe a hairy elephant smells like that, but in the perfume the costus is reinforced by musks and what I perceive as castoreum (and there might be something else). In general, the sillage of Elephant & Roses smells very far from a young rose in bloom and is closer to the ancient hairy mammoth than to the elephant. I didn't expect anything new to appear after the costus, yet some vetiver decided to show up, as well as some sandalwood oil, with its light sweetness, a little bit earlier. And as the last gasp – a light leather chord, weightless and thin.
It is surprising that Maria Candida Gentile managed to create three very different scent layers in her natural creation – in my experience, most natural fragrances were usually thicker and darker. Elephant & Roses reminds me of a beautiful, three-layered cocktail in the faded colors of the Italian flag: light green herbal, pink-purple flowery and milky white pearls of musk and animalics.
I really like Elephant & Roses in every phase of its strange development, every minute of it – although it is a not fault-free fragrance. Let me name one: the perfume holds too close to the skin, and I had to really look for the smell. It is like a fluffy gray animal, fine-boned, lightweight and therefore very intelligent and cautious – the behavior of ash-colored roses, reincarnated as a graceful and fragile herbivore.
Top notes: Thyme, Costus, Osmanthus;
Heart notes: Turkish Rose, Jasmine, Gray Amber;
Base notes: Java Vetiver, Sandalwood, Animalic accord, Leather accord.
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