Vincent Micotti of YS-UZAC Presented his New Fragrance in Perm

by: Evgeniya Chudakova

So, Perm is a city in central Russia, not far from Ural. And now it's become known among classical music fans as the current place of residence for one of the most admired musicians of nowadays, maestro Teodor Currentzis. Teodor is a Greek-born Russian conductor, musician and actor. He is also an art director of the now famous opera and ballet Diaghilev Festival held annually in Perm.

This year Diaghilev fest had its triumphal final on June 30 with a huge (both in scale and in meaning) performance. The music group musicAeterna, founded and guided by Teodor Currentzis, played for the first time the Sixth Symphony by Mahler. On July 2, the international group of musicians also performed the Sixth in Moscow, creating a huge hype among local music geeks. 

Each event with the participation of Teodor Currentzis owes the maestro's personality for the lion's share of its success. Being one of the most talented musicians of our time, a man of frightening passion and charisma, the one who creates a cult of himself at his fingertips, Teodor is mentioned today on Fragrantica not by coincidence. The maestro is passionate not only about music but about perfumery as well.  

Third Symphony by Mahler, musicAeterna, Teodor Currentzis (Diaghilev fest, 2014)

It's quite evident that nearly every perfumista at least once comes to an idea of creating his or her own scent. Teodor Currentzis realized his idea with the help of perfumer and cellist Vincent Micotti, the founder and perfumer behind Swiss niche brand  YS-UZAC. 

έαp 16 (Spring) M° Currentzis Perm Opera Edition Notes: rain, tears, cold air, ozone, rhubarb, cannabis, myrrh, incense, iris, woods, amber, ambergris infusion

Evgeniya: Why have you chosen Vincent Micotti for your perfume project?

Teodor: Because he is really one of the masters who create an alternative in the world of modern perfumery. I appreciate a philosophy behind a scent. I remember while visiting London I tried Vincent's fragrance  Sacre du Printemps and also his very radical Dragon Tattoo. I was astonished by a feeling that these were not fragrances that give familiar sensations, but ones that help to explore your own feelings longer, ones that open the door to a sort of déja vu, to more personal feelings. There are only three or four perfumers whose work influences me like this. And Vincent is one of them.

Evgeniya: Were you aware that Vincent is a musician?  

Teodor: No, I wasn't, first I tried his fragrances and later found out that he is musician and a friend of my friends. It was so surprising!  We met. I invited him to Zurich opera for my performance. After that we went to the cafe that Freud used to visit. There we started a strange conversation about psychology, about music and fragrances. And I realized that I want to step forward in this direction.

Evgeniya: Was there any brief of clear vision of the fragrance that you wanted to create or was everything settling down in the process? 

Teodor: No, I was sure about what I wanted to do. I wanted to create a feeling that the person who wears this perfume comes in from outside,  I wanted to have ozone in the scent...then, I love myrrh and incense, but using incense is tricky as it's very loud and usually dominates over all other smells, leaving its trail. I wanted to have the cool feeling inside the composition. And a general impression of spring, of epitaph, of falling in love, of nostalgia and joy of depression...

Evgeniya: Now I see a parallel with Mahler's Sixth performed by you...same re-thinking of a tragedy in a more uplifting, even triumphant way. 

Teodor: Yes, it seems to be so.

Evgeniya: You have practically answered my other question already but I'll firm it up: were there any particular components that you wanted to have in the composition? 

Teodor: I worked here solely in the field of fantasy and Vincent was responsible for technique. I did not tell him to put in any particular ingredient, I just described the images...hair smell, grandmother's house smell, a beloved one's skin smell....

Evgeniya: Have you received the desired fragrance finally? 

Teodor: I think so, but I'm still exploring it... I love complex fragrances.

All Vincent's works, especially the above-mentioned Sacre du Printemps and Dragon Tattoo, along with BOM Jasmine, BOM Incense, Oud Ankaa make an impression with their body, originality and, maybe, experimentality. But even their creator himself singles out έαp 16 amongst his other fragrances. According to him, all the named fragrances attract people with their brightness and eccentricity, and  έαp 16 is precious for its structure and more complex formula. 

"When maestro Teodor Currentzis asked me to create a new perfume, I understood that it would be a challenge. I did not have a strict purposes, I just had to make something perfect. My task was to hear Teodor and using aromatic tools to create a piece of non-material art, nearly similar to music. Now, when the fragrance is ready I'm proud of the accomplished work."—Vincent Micotti

And it's definitely more subtle and thin than Sacre du Printemps, more calm and quiet than Dragon Tattoo, not so big and bold as BOM Jasmine, but it's way more deep than the brand's other fragrances. It has an absolutely surprising starting accord that takes so much space both in work and in longevity and detailing. έαp 16 seems to have rather simple development—iris with a reference to green notes, dry incense, the white light of myrrh and grey amber—but they are so wonderfully texturized, that you feel yourself diving out of the wet, airy, cold green mist of Nature's first breaths of spring into a pearly-grey storm that is either cold snow or soft swan's down.

During the fragrance presentation Vincent talked about the different stages of creation, showing four separate scents that compose the final fragrance: two of them form the starting accord—cold and more background-forming Outdoor Cold Air and tart and a bit menthol-like wet and cold Rain Smell, dry woody-papery central accord An old Book and base accord Dark Side.

"έαp 16 (from Greek - 'Spring') is like an ouverture to a myth. A fragrant prologue with the bright traits of life itself. The opening note covers with ozonic freshness— this smell is brought to the house on mum's coat when she enters from the outside into a warm house. And in the house there are shelves with old books that share their secrets with a ready mind—the bitterness and warmth of myrrh. And here we are with the heart accord: there is incense near myrrh, it creates an image of a small stony chapel, warmed up with passionate prayers of Holy Fathers. You have a glance of then simple interior of the chapel and you look through the whiteness of a small window that gives into the yard where snow has already melted, uncovering soil where new greenery is starting to grow. Young iris stems are here in strange combination with rhubarb—a spicy smell with a bittersweet one.

This is the smell of an early spring that has its own rules. So the Universe is awakening step by step and the fragrance's base accord is developing its main ambergris note that seduces every living creature on Earth."—press release

I arrived to Perm knowing absolutely nothing about the new fragrance except for the name and the facts of the collaboration with Teodor Currentzis. Before the presentation I received the press release, but I intentionally did not read it thoroughly...just looked it through catching accidentally the words "iris," "myrrh," and "rhubarb." 

For the first time I tried έαp 16 one day before the official presentation. We met with Vincent at Lucas Debargue's concert and at the entrance to the Music Hall Vincent sprayed my hand once with έαp 16. My first impression was surprise to feel such a bright and watery-cold accord that is not so characteristic for the YS-UZAC brand at this stage (just remember the thick and bold perfumes of the last few years). The Following two hours I spent not only listening to Luca's beautiful piano, but smelling my wrist. And I had a perfectly clear image of this perfume's structure in my head. There were two main accords intertwining like DNA structure—a cold bittersweet note that recalled ashberries under snow and a cold green rhubarb note. These two accords were step by step drowning into a whirlpool of light and clear myrrh up to the moment when everything interfused to the uniform, slightly powdery, dry woody-papery accord with many different shades. Here you could notice iris, cashmeran, echoes of rhubarb and at the final stage, ambergris with its light skin-animalic shade.

It was all beautiful but this bitter berry/ashberry shade made a mess, dominating myrrh and rhubarb. 

I mean that from the very beginning the scent was interesting, but surprisingly, while seeming clear in structure (for that moment), it produces a rather chaotic impression. There was not some "click" that puts everything in their places, that turns on the limelights at the very moment when the mise en scène is ideal and you can see everything in its top.  

Having several samples with me, on the evening of the same day I sprayed it rather generously and here the miracle happened. No hint of this ashberry, but a huge and bright green Jupiter-like sphere, where, projecting some inner glow as under the spotlight, juicy and green, slightly sweet black current notes are bursting along with thick-and-loud-as-Vivaldi-violins rhubarb notes. Here are hundreds of shades of clear and clean cold air and smoky greenery—something lush and green recalling violet Baruti Tindrer, something bitter-smoky dark green from Aedes de Venustas Signature. Step by step this sphere is being filled with grainy iris notes, incense smoke and a dry myrrh cloud. Wet and green shades still try to get through this cover but with every minute this incensy woody-papery mist becomes more dry, sometimes having even limey-warmth, recalling the white walls of orthodox churches. And as a final accord there is ambergris with its semi-transparent bluish-grey animalic shades, warm and a bit woolly sour.   

Each time I tried έαp 16, there were two clearly visible phases: cold green and warm papery-balmy. But the moment when they change one another was every time different. Sometimes the rhubarb that seemed to disappear came back in three or four hours. And yes, this fragrance can play hide-and-seek with you, disappearing and reappearing with renewed vigor. A couple of times I could not even understand from where I smelled such an amazing scent and was searching for it near me. So, if you try έαp 16, I do recommend doing it attentively and pensively. 

There was a moment in our conversation with Teodor that I left till the end of the article.

Teodor: ...We are planning to make a new fragrance soon. 

Evgeniya: Yeah...I remember your assistant Maria mentioned a new fragrance for the next Diaghilev fest. Will it be an absolutely new composition or a reissue of έαp 16? 

Teodor: Absolutely new. We are thinking of launching scents for Diaghilev fest annually.

Jane: Wow, what  great news! It sounds like an amazing big perfume project!

Teodor: Thank you! 

For the moment έαp 16 is a limited edition available in Russia and online at the official YS-UZAC web-site. But possibly later it may become part of the general colection of the brand. 

Photo: Jane Wonder

Ys-Uzac - Beautiful and Modern

by: Elena Knezhevich

Esxence 2015 has brought many pleasant surprises. First of all, it's opened in a new facility, much bigger and more comfortable, as almost everyone  has mentioned at the show. It is really very convienient to meet people and smell fragrances—we all have room for spraying scents and talking. [Maybe it was little bit too dark—that is why our pictures are so dramatic. ;o) ]

Another piece of good news is that we've seen many new perfume brands and big diversity in trends. Perfumes and approaches have become more complex and more abstract. Some trends from the previous years have been re-thought and introduced in different ways.

I would like to illustrate them with a perfume line that is truly artistic and for that reason, trend-setting—Ys-Uzac from Switzerland. Vincent Micotti, the perfumer, and Vera Yeoh, the designer and the muse, have come to Esxence with two new perfumes which form a new collection, BLEND of MARVELS (BOM). The new perfumes are BOM Jasmine (Green) and BOM Incense (Blue).

I always admire the designs of Ys-Uzac's booths, which prove a very encouraging truth: you do not need luxurious materials to produce beauty. Their very inspiring presentation was built of paper and imagination. This time, they invite us to a city.

In my opinion, they have always created for modern people from modern cities. This time they stressed it explicitly with this beautiful design. Jasmine, with the green label, is what we smell in the streets in springtime. (It could also be linden, lilac, chestnuts—any romantic smell of a blooming bush or tree you have in your city.) It announces the time of marvelous change in the city, when every citizen forgets the cold, dirt or snow in the streets and loves it with all his/her heart. Vincent created a realistic jasmine in the urban enviroment.

The other perfume is more abstract. It is incense-based, but neither churchy nor oriental in its nature. To me, it captures a city's shadows, the rises along tall buildings. It starts quite sharp and green—galbanum-like wild pistachio leads in the top. If the first fragrance invites us to enjoy the green treasures of the city in its parks and streets, Incense, with all its greenness, represents the city's soul, its buzz and blocks of gray, brown, dark colors. Which is not to say it's uninviting.

I used to live in big cities. When I come to one, like now to Milan, I realize how much I miss their sounds: the rattle of trams in the night, laughter of people in the street—and their cozy feeling of togetherness. Narrow windows, balconies with tiny gardens of a few pots, small living spaces that do not seem incapacious. I do not feel claustrophobic in the city; I feel so well, and that is what I've found in the new urban Incense by Ys-Uzac.

Vera Yeoh, who created all this beauty

Incense does not transport you to far away places. It might smell a little religious, but you are not inside the church, you are passing by it. Starting with green sharpness, it seems, it even accumulates this feeling of "green," but in a different and cozier way, together with the warmth of incense.

Incense: wild pistachio, sandarac, Eritrean frankincense.

Vincent and Vera displayed three perfumes we already saw at the previous Esxence. I hate to run exclusively for the new stuff at such events, especially when the scents feel so actual! These three (Sacre du Printemps, Dragon Tattoo and Oud Ankaa) are limited to a few stores the owners wish to distinguish.

Oud Ankaa represents what is now actual in an oud-trend: to smell it natural, animalic, unpolished, dirty. It has a very sensible stable and hay touch. Although Vincent insists he doesn't follow trends and I believe him, his Oud Ankaa hits it precisely. As I said, the talents of perfumery sense trends in the air without any advice.

The flacon is decorated with gold, with a golden phoenix carved and painted on the back side.

My favorite is Dragon Tattoo: "The olfactive representation of a girl, punk and tattooed, during a party, was particularly captivating. The smell of her social statement, of her tattoos, of her diet, of her vision of the world had to be put into this particular potion."

I was surprised and I love it. The fragrance balances on the edge of addiction and repulsion when you inhale it first time. It is a mess of different characteristic we give to an "untethered" teenage girl. She wants to party all night, she is attracted to forbidden things, she wants to be bad, but she also senses a huge social demand to "good" and a healthy life. That is why the marijuna presented here is in reasonable homeopathic doses.

I smell rubber, a leather jacket, a woman's hair with some paint and gel in it, ink, cozy woody notes, some sweetness of caramel, and the most appealing—a grapefruit note, which is not obvious, but participates in many dirty nuances. To me it is one of the most modern perfumes if we can apply such terms to perfumes anyway.

Smelling Ys-Uzac we can say what is "in": modern, urban, abstract perfumes. You might say we've been fed with this idea even before D&G Light Blue, but it is now re-thought and introduced in a more sophisticated way. Nature-inspired perfumes were at the forefront a few years ago, and we still have many of them, but they also have been transformed into more sophisticated compositions.

Expect sophisticated fougères, peculiar orientals, "raw" ouds, complex florals. Some might call it a mess in a bottle.

Photos by Elena Knezhevich

Perfuming in Present Time: An Interview with Vincent Micotti, Perfumer of YS-UZAC, Switzerland

by: John Biebel

Recently I was very fortunate to have a conversation with Vincent Micotti, perfumer and founder of YS-UZAC, the cutting-edge Swiss perfume brand that has brought us such modern classics as Pohadka, Immortal Beloved, and Oud Ankaa. Vincent and I spoke between Lausanne, Switzerland and Boston, Massachusetts, US on a cold and snowy day (in both our respective countries), managing however to conjure up the rich color of perfumed creativity. Mr. Micotti’s newest creations have been reviewed here on Fragrantica, and YS-UZAC will be represented at Esxence 2015.

Vincent Micotti and Vera Yeoh, founders of YS-UZAC

John Biebel: Mr. Micotti, can you tell me something about your background as a perfumer? How did you come to work in perfume?

Vincent Micotti: Perfume has always been around me, as my family was closely befriended with someone in the perfume industry already. This made me aware of this as a job from a very young age. So the passion for scents, and my artistic background (I made two Doctor of Musical Arts degrees) took me almost by force, and I got deep into the creation of perfumes.

JB: Could you tell me some more about your background in Music?

VM: Yes, well perfume has been an interest forever, but I had another interest, which is cello, classical music. I studied this instrument very seriously in Europe first in Switzerland and then in Germany. It’s been a big part of my life, and I was very happy that I could study with great, incredible and famous teachers in music now.

JB: And did you start to play very young? Did you begin your studies at a young age?

VM: Children start to play very young, of course. I started to really work and study heavily, very constantly in my formative years, so I spent many years of my life on this instrument.

JB: I’m sure this must have had a very big influence on you in the creation of perfumes—there must be a lot of connections for you.

VM: Obviously creativity starts in your mind, in your head, in your everyday life, however you need some way to express that creativity, through paint or through music—and I did this so much with music. It makes it all more obvious for me when I started mixing in perfume, to imagine what this or that could smell like, what it could react like with something else; it was what I was doing for many, many years with music.

JB: Mediums like music or scent, when you see them in your mind, they are both time-based (they have a beginning, an end; they have a duration.) What do you think of time-based media? One thing about painting is that it’s not time based, which is both good and bad (a painting just kind of sits there.) Do you find this an important part of the media? Is it important that it come to an end?

VM: The creation of music … of perfume—I can’t just write exactly what I’m doing or thinking—I can’t just stop at one point and just pick up exactly where I was the next day. Music you can stop and record it and go back and replay it, and you could have done it magnificently well. That is one major difference between music and perfume. It is a fact that there is a beginning, a middle and an end, as opposed to painting, which can be appreciated as it is for a longer time. But depending on your mood, this type of expression will change. If you put on a perfume on a morning, if you’re happy that day—or depressed that day, because of bad weather or something bad that happened to you, the music you’re listening to, it will be different depending on your mood. So the experience will change based on your point of view.

JB: One thing I love about YS-UZAC scents is that they have a very distinct “flavor” to them—and I think it has to do with the combination of citrus and fruits with unusual base notes. This makes the perfumes a bit melancholic, but very modern, almost urban. What can you say that is distinct about YS-UZAC perfumes?

VM: The idea behind YS-UZAC was to bring different ideas, mostly more personal views, to perfumery. The market is literally flooded by perfumes that are very straightforward and that follow the usual bestsellers. Artistic perfumery often comes from very innovative ideas, and we want to be an active part of the creative few by proposing new olfactive families, for example. I also love to discover rare ingredients, and introduce them into my perfumes.

YS-UZAC DRAGON TATTOO

JB: Dragon Tattoo, one of your newest perfumes, is a great example of contradictions—sharp but smooth, sparkling but solid. What can you tell me about Dragon Tattoo and what you achieved with this perfume?

VM: Dragon Tattoo started with a question: What does skin smell like to you? My thoughts went immediately to a modern type of skin, rather than the usual poetic point of view. I wanted to work on the smell of a tattooed skin, preferably of an insolent and dirty party girl. The mixture between ink, sweat, and chewing gum, was a wonderful way to start. I finally got a magnetic scent, something that draws everyone to smell it over and over. I like to classify this as an animalic-gourmand, which is obviously not a classic family. The formulation is focused, and I used some raw ingredients that are very uncommon.

We proposed with YS-UZAC very contemporary perfumes since its debut, with the green leather Pohadka for an example, or more recently with truly unique perfumes such as Dragon Tattoo or the Sacre du Printemps. Now, the image we worked on needed to be as rich in details as possible—as rich as the facets of the fragrances are themselves, clearly.

JB: Speaking of Pohadka, this perfume is a particular love of mine. Can you tell me a bit more about Pohadka? What were some of your ideas behind this, what were you thinking when you wanted to make it, what was your goal, and is there something about the final product that you’d like to share?

VM: The initial idea behind Pohadka was to put a few elements I really appreciated together, such as the Shiso leaf, inside a perfume. It is an ingredient which is incredibly famous in Japan, but not well known outside of that part of Asia. It took years for it to become better known. It’s just one of the elements I wanted to use. Some other brands have tried to use this element but don’t really use it too well. I thought that working on a green, leathery, smoky perfume would be quite an interesting challenge; It’s not usually leather perfumes’ power (green), for most people do not think of grass or wild grass in a green perfume, which is a completely different shade of green, so this was another inspiration for that. Most people don’t think of fresh cut grass as part of leather perfume. The name comes from Czech and means “tale” or “fairy tale,” from an old story that our grandmother had told us, and it comes from a vision of autumn light—a big bunch of interesting ideas that come together.

JB: That’s wonderful, that description. It’s quite beautiful. When you mention the green—I know many of the green notes in perfumes are quite tricky to create, since many of the natural elements that give off that green smell have to be man-made, and sometimes they smell very medicinal or grassy (in not such a nice way) …

VM: You have a good example in painting; green can mean absolutely everything in painting. If you look at a master, you can see how many different colors there actually are inside the green. It takes many different colors to make a green become nice-looking.

JB: Switzerland has not been known as a perfume center before—what do you think a Swiss perspective gives to your perfumes?

VM: This is an interesting question, as Switzerland and Swiss products are within almost every perfume on earth, through research and development of incredibly famous synthetic molecules. Don’t forget that both Givaudan and Firmenich are Swiss companies. Current headspace technology has been brought to its current state by Swiss researchers, too. However, as only a few star perfumers live and work in Switzerland, the digital world doesn’t hear much about this country. But no perfumer today could create perfumes without the Swiss perfume industry. My country, however, gives me the luxury of living in a city that is both modern (really at the heart of modern) and yet just five minutes away from nature.

JB: I sense something very playful about your perfumes, as well as serious. I've read that you value imagination as an important resource. Can you talk about how the imagination helps guide your creations?

VM: I believe that the capacity of smelling the perfume before mixing is a key, just as I need to hear a tone before playing it. M. Rostropovich, one of the most brilliant cellists ever, and my cello teacher’s mentor, said once that he wanted to live in a fairy tale, as this world is too serious. How much fairy tale, and how much seriousness do we need?

JB: I’ve now sampled all your scents with the exception of one; I have to say I find something interesting in each of them. I also wanted to ask you specifically about Monodie, mostly because of the rhubarb accord inside it. Where I come from, the climate here supports rhubarb very well, so it grows into huge bushes. It’s a very common smell here in the early spring. But in your perfume, it’s in this beautiful combination of many things. I was fascinated by the brightness of the scent. What were some of your thoughts behind this one?

VM: When I created the first series of four perfumes, I felt one of them had to be kind of younger and sparkling like champagne, and I really wanted to create an accord of a small yellow plum. There is a plum called Mirabelle, which is about an inch long, and it’s incredibly sweet, and it’s a plum you find everywhere in Europe. It has a light scent, and I wanted this perfume to stay light, and didn’t want the fruit to be too ripe. With rhubarb, as you know, you have the big rhubarb, or the light, small British rhubarb that can grow in darkness. I liked this rhubarb—it has a lot of acidic notes. I had to recreate this acidic feeling with other products, and in Monodie, it came out very cool!

JB: The sparkling effect of it is very surprising—it’s almost a physical “feel.”

VM: I’m quite happy the way it went—it worked well. A very lovely perfume.

JB: I was so excited to see the most recent perfumes, they’re so different from what you’ve been doing before. They have some similarities, but at the same time, very different themes besides the packaging being very different. It’s as though you opened a new door into another room of what you’re going to create, and I thought, “They’re going to be doing some very different things.” Like, you took this very dramatic turn …

VM: [laughs]

JB: … into these dark, reactionary, almost primal perfumes. What do you think led you there?

VM: Well, remember there was quite a lot of work between the last two of the last series of perfumes and the new three. I had a lot of work that I’d done for different people in between, and bespoke work as well, and this work did help to open some new doors that I wouldn’t have thought of myself without some of this influence. First of all, this urge was very clear with the Stravinsky perfume palette—there is such a power in this music, in this palette, and I found some new smells, new oils. These new products allowed me to have a bit more freedom: smaller batches, smaller output, so a freer way … The Oud perfume was influenced by some work that I did for one customer. The amount of real oud oil inside there (Oud Ankaa) is extremely high. It’s much higher than is usual in most commercial perfumes; they could never afford to use that much—it’s really strong. And of course it works, because the output is very small, the customers who want to buy this product are also a smaller customer audience, so therefore I could go to this extent to create this perfume, to develop it this far.

JB: This is something I’m beginning to understand better about the smaller niche perfume companies. Because you’re able to make these smaller, personal batches of perfume, this is rather liberating, isn’t it? You’re able to change your model and work with some of the rarer and more expensive materials in your work?

VM: It is exactly that. It’s impossible to invest money in perfume and hope to keep it at a very fair price—this is a key to understanding what we are able or not able to do. It’s exactly the same as for food. You cannot use the same ingredients in family restaurants as you would for fast food. This is the key for smaller restaurants, compared to restaurants with larger distribution.

JB: It starts to make sense now. Initially I was trying to understand the model; when you look at the large perfume houses, economically, and how they have to invest so much in their advertising in order to make their sales, the model starts to makes sense. But it seems that your brand is doing quite well. I’m seeing more and more people who recognize the name of your company, and know the perfumes.

VM: Exactly! I’m very happy about the way it’s developing. We keep small, because there’s no room to play the game wrong here, but I see the interest growing, and it makes me very happy.

JB: It’s exciting, I’ve seen your brand over the past few years—your perfumes manage to be modern without being unwearable.

VM: That’s right! I wouldn’t make something that myself, my wife, or my close friends wouldn’t want to wear!

JB: I’ve had some discussions with some friends and artists about the dangers of nostalgia. You can get dragged a bit into nostalgia, and there’s something to be said about creating modern things that look into the present and future, that look simply at “now” for their references. I’ve been interested in this idea. I think your work is very modern in this way, for all the good reasons. A few of your perfumes, when I smell them, I don’t make an association with the past but with the present.

VM: It’s interesting that you say that because we try (and I say “we” because I refer also to my wife, because we are creating things, doing things together,) the idea was to not create fake history. Our brand started with Pohadka in 2011, and it was a decision from the beginning to work this way. The brand doesn’t have a long history; we are not that type of brand. This is a decision from the beginning, and it reflects in the perfume as well. When you study the great masters of perfume, these masters were making extremely modern perfumes, they were using the newest molecules they could find, and they were excited to use any of them for the first time. It’s correct to say that not every luxury brand has a long history. Some are just very young and try very hard.

JB: I remember when I was looking into your company and looking at your site, there wasn’t a ton of information about you, and I thought, “this is interesting, they’re not overdoing the back-story” which is quite good. It created some mystery!

VM: My wife and I said to ourselves “let’s do this, and let’s do this in our own way and try to communicate in a different way and produce in our own way.”

JB: Your wife works primarily in your image, brand and creative and design aspects, correct?

VM: Yes, she is behind the visual design and all the ideas relative to the look of the brand. They are her ideas, her creations. By having that chance to make all things the way we want, it’s incredibly nice to have that kind of control over the finished product. And we only have our own product to work on. Doing what we want and the way we want, it presents more work—from creation to the finished product is a big gap, but we’re involved in the process the whole way.

JB: This must be very freeing for you, to hand this aspect off to someone to work on so that you can you be free to work on what you do best.

VM: It’s a question we always wonder about, because in the future when we are growing, and we can use people to do some of the production work, how much of that work do you want to give to somebody else? It’s a personal question, a difficult question.

JB: What are your plans for the next few years with YS-UZAC? Can you tell us what is coming ahead, without revealing any secrets?

VM: Some interesting projects are on my table right now, both for the bespoke clients and for our regular customers. The fact that our entire production is in-house, where formulation and mixing take place, allows me to be very flexible and develop projects for other customers or brands, too. Many clients visit us here, too. We will show one new product in Milano soon, it’s a very interesting perfume, a complex (but easy to wear) product, and it might be the beginning of a new collection, a new edition of products, a new step in design and image. The perfume itself is surprising: It comes from a new extraction method for some of the oils, some of the newest methods available now, and it will be a quite a different perfume (again), as you can expect of course.

YS-UZAC fragrances on display at Esxence 2013

JB: Some of the new extraction technologies are significantly changing the world of scent. This must be changing the palette of what’s available to you. It reminds me of a wonderful rose CO₂ extraction I smelled a few years ago.

VM: Exactly, absolutely. Just four or five years ago, to make a rose extraction as you mention, even just a few years back, would be very heavy and expensive. Now it is mobile and closer to the fields, the process has become almost normal. Today some of the products that are on the market are so remarkable—even though they are expensive, they are still okay price-wise compared to the older processes, and it’s a joy to be mixing stuff today. There is a way to access almost everything, and different extraction methods for almost everything. Every time I meet a supplier, I’m excited to see some new things coming out from their world. It’s really great to be here now and experience this stuff.

JB: When you say that, it reinforces this idea I have that your perfumes are very much based in the present, and that you’re getting the most out of the technologies available today.

VM: It’s one of the advantages of being small. Because I don’t have to wonder if I can only buy 4 kilos of one product, when a big perfume house has to buy 400 kilos of that product.

JB: Do you have a strong scent memory from childhood, something that has stayed with you?

VM: The smell of the air before snow. This is—and remains—magic for me.

JB: Tell us something about your company name: YS-UZAC? What does it mean?

VM: This name was created to reflect our different direction towards perfumery, and our modern view on artistic creations. It is a sound, an attention-grabbing name, but first of all, 'YS' are my wife’s initials.

JB: What would you like your perfume wearers to know most about your creations?

VM: That the discovery of my perfumes is also the discovery of themselves.

JB: Who is the YS-UZAC customer?

VM: Our perfumes are not for everyone, and in the future of the brand we will see even more unique and personal products appear. We want to speak to passionate perfume lovers, who understand that perfume is above all a statement and a reflection of oneself.

Read John's recent review of the newest YS-UZAC perfumes and visit the official YS-UZAC website to find a local retailer or shop online. 
 

Portrait and Esxence photo: Fragrantica. All other images: YS-UZAC

The New Perfumes of Ys-Uzac

by: John Biebel

The Swiss perfume house Ys-Uzac has released three new perfumes within a short time span: Sacre du Printemps in mid-2014, Oud Ankaa and Dragon Tattoo in January 2015. All three are limited editions, Parfum Extraits. They are linked by the fascinating visual theme of black bottles; Printemps and Ankaa feature hand-gilding of gold leaf on the bottles and Tattoo sports a leather band of steel spike-like studs, almost daring the wearer to try to hold the bottle safely. They are arresting, singular and striking. The perfumes are not only linked by their paradoxes of light and dark (spring, stars, and lithe dragons), but matched by an uncompromising richness of scent experience. They are all, in their unique ways, quixotic experiences of extremes: chiaroscuro, silhouette, high-contrast. They float and sink alternately around you. This is the wonder of Ys-Uzac and its fingerprint on the world of scent.

Sacre du Printemps celebrates Igor Stravinsky and his monumental musical work The Rite of Spring. I had to smile to see the dark bottle that houses this creation because, as anyone who’s heard Rite of Spring knows, it is anything but gentle. It is a savage piece of music, reflecting the tumultuous rise of saplings from the ground, the quaking of the earth as roots shake foundations. It reflects the violence of nature as it rips across the dormant landscape. Stravinsky composed this glorious work one hundred years previously while he was staying in Switzerland (in Lavaux, Lake Geneva region). Ys-Uzac’s perfumer and primary visionary of the brand, Vincent Micotti, composed the fragrance in the same region, and then manufactured the scent in Basel. He and Vera Yeoh, who works as a creative director to Ys-Uzac, premiered this scent at Esxence in 2014.

Sacre du Printemps Notes: Galbanum, Black currant, Vetiver, Guaiac wood, Angelica

The perfume evokes juicy roots of slumbering greenery that have been suddenly awakened. It is a green, herbal scent that does not carry the fuzzy or medicinal aspects of herbal scents, but instead circles slowly up from the skin in a hazy fog of fern-colored shards. It is solidly anchored by a temperate vetiver, not too cool or too warm, but just at skin temperature. Black currant, that unusual note of both bitter and sweet, seems to vacillate up and down in space in its rich darkness, but bursting open with small bubbles like champagne or caviar. Sacre du Printemps is a three-dimensional perfume in that it plays actively in space, on the skin, in the air. Despite this, it remains a close-to-the-skin experience, an intimate perfume. There is an aspect of private wonder to this dark and lovely Rite of Spring, something that you want to keep to yourself.

The combination of galbanum and black currant in a perfume is volcanic in that it seems to erupt into a multitude of different sub-notes—what are they? Celery, wild carrot, rhubarb, cherry, grass, hay, mushroom, green moss, lichen, lime, celery seed, wood shavings. The nose is searching out for the familiar, but it only goes to show how certain compositions can create exponential experiences for us, as we multiply the sum into its greater parts. Sacre du Printemps succeeds as a complex green perfume of unique contrasts—sharp in its opening, mellow and gentle as it fades into a lovely and extremely wearable vetiver. It is a worthy tribute to Stravinsky and his vital work, which has forever changed the way we envision the reawakening of the world in spring.
 

Oud Ankaa Notes: Aged oud, Wood, Floral notes, Saffron

Oud Ankaa is a dark beauty named after the brightest star in the phoenix constellation: Ankaa. Intensely woody, it reminds you that oud is indeed a wood. You can instantly picture the wood chips in your mind's eye as you sniff this intensely smoky creation. It has the unique ability to smell of both wood and smoke at the same time—usually one overpowers the other, but in this case, they coincide. As you spray it, you’re struck by the sharp combination of prickling, probing saffron threads mingling with the oily opening in the uppermost base of the oud. What a joy to smell actual oil from oud in this perfume—a rare treasure as many oud-related perfumes on the market today simply do not contain real oud because of cost. Smelling the base (oud wood) and the catalyst (fire) and the result (smoke) all at the same time, you experiencing them in equal proportions like points on a triangle. It is a composition with other wood notes, very delicate florals, hard to specify, but perhaps a pale sort of rose and a bit of carnation. Together the composition is rich but shimmery—a spectacle of light against blackness. This is one of the few smoky oud perfumes I’ve smelled that manages not to be bitter. There is balance. Micotti says, “The first Swiss-made oud perfume by a Swiss perfumer." Has the Swiss touch brought a lovely diplomacy to oud and made its intensity into something of deep loveliness?

Over two hours, the perfume fades in a loose little burning cloud that hovers quietly over the body, the projection expanding outward. It becomes gentler and more oaken, smoldering, ashy, dry. It seems to deepen as it travels later into the night, darker, like a campfire that's very slowly going out, stars overhead.

Dragon Tattoo Notes: Leather, ink, caramel, fruit, musk

We shift from the glorious dark beauties of night skies and nature’s rituals to the high contrast of a modern young woman, in control of her night, her surroundings, her vision of the world. Dragon Tattoo is a fascinating exploration into "skin scent," something that reflects what someone could smell like—a young woman, a woman with tattoos, with smells around her of leather and ink, fruits and face cream. Who is this woman? She clearly eschews authority, makes her own way. This scent isn’t traditional in any sense. It opens with a bright and sour blast, like yuzu, pineapple and lime gummy candies merged together in a bag. Mixing with these youthful and brazen fruit smells is the stingingly delightful scent of ink—that earthy but clear and bright black note that is akin the smell of rain touching dry ground. Is this the ink of tattoos?

These opening notes last a long while, at least an hour, as the base of musk and gentle sugar and caramel make their way in, extending the fruit into something rounder and more firmly settled into the ground. There’s something audacious and completely unexpected about this perfume. You wonder about this young woman—where does she live, what does she look like? What makes her so strong, because clearly she is a woman of resolve. This is one of those rare perfumes that perfectly captures a person (as opposed to a place or a moment in time) in all her complexity and contradiction. The notes, which seem so discordant when observed on paper, create a symphony of personality: a woman alternately lovely and vulnerable, dangerous and warm.

Dragon Tattoo has a long life as a perfume; it lasts for many hours. Ironically, despite being the scent of someone’s skin, it projects rather well into the air and creates a layer-like cloak of scent, but never cloying or too heavy. It is unisex, with nods to both the feminine and the masculine. As with many other Ys-Uzac perfumes, it is such an unusual combination of notes, but it evolves as a surprising mélange both bold and comforting, the dragon emerging from the skin to slink about the body.

Vincent Micotti and Vera Yeoh of Ys-Uzac

The man behind the unique creations from Ys-Uzac, Vincent Micotti, will be featured soon in an interview with Fragrantica.

All product images: Ys-Uzac

YS-UZAC: New Perfumes OUD ANKAA and DRAGON TATTOO

by: Eugeniya Chudakova

Founders of YS- UZAC: Vera Yeoh and Vincent Micotti

After launching in 2014 a gorgeous scent called Sacre du Printemps, Vincent and Vera continue exploring the aromatic Universe in many ways. Recently there appeareda note about their charity project with Le Parfum de Jeanne. Now I want to talk about something we missed, something that recently appeared and something we'll meet in 2015.

OUD ANKAA

Earlier in 2014, during Esxence '14, Vincent showed me a couple of samples of perfumes he worked at for a time. One of them was deep, dark, animalic scent with a velvety-gold touch. Finally, this fragrance is meeting the public.

"The first Swiss-made Oud perfume made by a Swiss perfumer. Taking the brightest giant star in Phoenix constellation Ankaa (from the Arabic العنقاءal-‘anqā’ "the phoenix") as a characteristic symbol, the formulation is made to make the best selected natural oud extract to glow in the dark and to unveil the dazzling side of the profound "black diamond"—oud." There will be only 200 flacons of Oud Ankaa, hand decorated with enamel and gold leaf.

Notes: oud, wood accords, floral notes, saffron.

DRAGON TATTOO

During Pitti Fragranze '14 there was a workshop held concerning skin scent. The idea of this workshop was to invite brands and perfumers to work with extreme rapidity and instinctive passion in order to create perfumes whose inspiration was the skin.

We will definitely cover all the scents that were made as soon as I get the samples of them and now just a couple of words from YS-UZAC's Vincent Micotti, who participated in this project with the fragrance called Dragon Tattoo that can be pre-ordered now at the YS-UZAC official website.

"The olfactive representation of a girl, punk and tattooed, during a party, was particularly captivating. The smell of her social statement, of her tattoos, of her diet, of her vision of the world had to be put into this particular potion."

Notes: skin, tattoo ink, sun-cream, face cream, caramel, fruits, musk.

Considering that YS-UZAC doesn't waste its time in vain, we can be sure to encounter some exciting fragrances in 2015. And considering some of the wonderful samples I tried before, they should be something super-nice.

YS-UZAC: Le Parfum de Jeanne

by: Eugeniya Chudakova

Recently we wrote about Mark Buxton's participation in a charity project with Amsterdam perfume. Now we found out that Vincent Micotti from YS-UZAC also made his contribution into the noble charity movement.

As Vincent told me: "All started in June, when I met the Dr. Jeanne Fürst, who is presenting a very well known health program on the Swiss national TV. She wanted to make a program about the nose, smell sense and about anosmia. She wanted to invite me to talk on the program, and after a short while, it became certain that we had to do something together. The idea would be to develop a perfume for her, that would be sold in Switzerland only, and only over their platform, and two shops.

"So I hard to work very hard and very fast to develop her perfume (on the whole I had to make about six different perfumes, as she couldn't be sure), but also to get the bottles, the packaging and all on time, as the TV can't wait. The result is a very lovable unisex perfume, made in the best niche style, where you will find complex facets around mandarin, citrus, tonka, jasmine and woods, that can lighten up the dark and unfunny months of November and December. As the target customers would be over 50, I had to remain classic and have an easy access, but I tried to bring as much fun and facets as possible, and still used some very classical ingredients."

All profits are given to a foundation Denk an mich ("Think of me") that organizes holidays for disabled people.

"Denk an mich allows holiday and leisure experiences for people with a disability, but also a respite for parents and relatives. Besides Denk an mich supports specific projects to destroy barriers between people with and without disability and thereby promotes integration and solidarity."

Le Parfum de Jeanne arrived to be a very bright and generous perfume that opens with gourmand sweety mandarin notes, even with hints of cinnamon that make you think about a nice dessert—caramelized mandarins with cinnamon, warm mulled wine and a cozy evening by the fireplace. Thanks to further scent development with a warm flowery-cashmere accord (which gives to Le Parfum de Jeanne a noticeable YS-UZAC touch—that powdery-lacy lightness that exists in any perfume made by Vincent and Vera) that later turns to blonde woods with some classic "Chanel-ish" touch, this composition is really a great, comfortable and happy scent that definitely can lighten up any bad mood.

Head notes: Mandarin, Lemon, Bergamot
Heart notes: Jasmine, Blackcurrant
Base notes: Tonka, woods, vanilla

You can buy perfume on the YS-Uzac website.