Niche Fragrance & Men's Grooming — Australia

My favourite product. Classic fragrance that is also long lasting.

It really smells beautiful,

It clings to my clothes, my hair, my soul, and mixes with my natural pheromones so well I feel like a sexy cryptid at the dog park, it smells like a dinosaur just stomped through a forest fire, then it melts into this weirdly cozy smoky hug on my skin.

This scent is absolute chaos in a bottle and I mean that as the highest compliment.

Solid

Sharp as a razor

The best

I saw this perfume on tiktok and decided I had to try it, I didn't know what to expect and was hoping for the best but expecting the worst. I am so pleasantly surprised at how this dries down on the skin. Beautiful

Bought this not really expecting it to be as good as it is. Only necessary for longer hairstyles I think but the amount of volume it creates is crazy. Staple now in the styling process for me. The bottles are quite small so bare that in mind.

this is the one. if i only get to keep one perfume, this is the perfume. the fragrance every other fragrance in my archive is triangulated against, whether i realise it or not.
writing a review of it is almost stupid because what i actually want to say is: yes. this. forever.
but okay. the descriptors. warm, powdery, intimate. weirdly addictive and almost uncomfortable, and the uncomfortable is the point. it smells too much like something real. not like "a perfume" in any register i recognise, more like heated skin with the volume slightly turned up. the best possible version of my own body, returned to me through a 25 percent extrait.
apparently bianchi kept stripping materials back until she arrived at a restrained animalic, leathery and powdery and velvety, and that restraint is the whole trick. it's animalic enough to be genuinely interesting but it never goes fecal or barnyard. it stays in the register of human warmth. costus doing its slightly dirty skin-adjacent thing, castoreum and ambergris adding depth, orris butter bringing the warm powdery carroty glow that melds with body heat. it's simultaneously exterior and interior. you can't tell where it ends and you begin.
the wrist-sniffing is real and compulsive and apparently universal with this one. i cannot stop smelling my own wrist when i'm wearing it. i'll be doing something completely unrelated and i'll catch a quiet waft of myself and lose three minutes. nothing else in my archive does this.
and then there's the territorial thing. when i smell it on other people i feel a small mean flicker of annoyance, which is not rational and not nice and is, as far as i can tell, the official diagnostic test for whether a fragrance is actually your signature. full bottle. repurchased. would repurchase forever. if bianchi ever reformulates this i will go into mourning.

love. signature. second full bottle i've actually bought after extended sampling, which tells you everything before i start describing it.
the closest reference point is zoologist bee, same beeswax-honey-floral register.
the honey here is not sweet honey. it's dense and waxy, the real beeswax thing with its slightly medicinal undercurrent, like a warming honeycomb candle you've just blown out. fatty, opaque, golden. if someone put sweet on this i'd understand why they said it but the word is wrong. it's warm. that's different.
there's a bitter slightly medicinal green edge running through the opening that stops the whole thing from becoming a dessert. i think it's the tobacco blossom, which apparently functions more like dry hay and chamomile than pipe tobacco, and it works like a seatbelt keeping the honey from tipping into cloying. underneath all of that is creamy tuberose and a resin base holding the structure up.
it's a lot, but in a good way. intoxicating, tactile, very sexy. a languid summer afternoon standing too close to a beehive and not wanting to move. warmth and sweetness and something slightly dangerous about how much of it there is.
the thing i keep thinking about is how this sits next to under my skin in my head. under my skin is my anchor, the castoreum-leather-skin road to the animalic. slowdive is the honey-beeswax-waxy-floral road to the same core preference. two completely different structures getting to the same feeling. it tells me something about myself i didn't fully know before: my animalic love isn't about any specific material, it's about warmth and body and a slight sense of danger, and there are apparently many paths to it.

God what a scent. What an absolute winner of a scent. If you’re someone who wishes to combine frutiger aqua, dreamcore and liminal spaces all into one package- let me encourage you to hold onto seahorse with both hands. This is the smell of the 90’s. The jelly candle, the dolphin statue, the future they promised us but never delivered. Seahorse is the stronger, yet kinder cousin of Portuguese Man O’ War (10/10 by the way). It took me a while to figure out if I liked Seahorse or Penguin more but I find Penguin is colder, more absent (in feeling, definitely not in scent). Seahorse is joy. I am 100% certain this perfume will be my first niche perfume house full bottle buy.

The first note comes across as metallic- blood & iodine. An underground, dimly lit mental hospital where they experiment on society's incapacitated comes to mind. Next is a masculine note. Not warm masculine, unnerving masculine. It reminded me of a dark eyed, long haired unknown man in a leather jacket, standing on a dark road in the rain at 3am, holding a weapon he just used. Another note was smoky amber. A shack in the middle of a remote snowy location springs to mind, with just a fireplace flickering through the windows & the smell of gunpowder in the air. A really unique, brain-teasing scent. The Xbox game "Outlast" also comes to mind. Definitely not for the faint-hearted.

Not really the idealised mud texture I had imagined. Mind you it is very sweet and more a cocoa dusting over a rose/plum/vanilla combo. Very long lasting with a misleading name

meet fellow frag heads, a friendly eclectic mix who share and discuss personal collections. Always informative, often challenging and surprising .. Ably coordinated by Liam from Noah who brings an academic rigour, solid knowledge, much fun, and Juicy industry tit bits. Hang back after to mingle and sample the growing Noah range. See you there!

Fast shipping, no problems at all, will definitely shop with again