The menagerie continues to grow: its residents swing, scuttle, glide, burrow, stampede, and float amongst each other in this glorious motley. Indeed, this is part of their charm, the personality of a creature might resonate with you, or its smell might simply appeal to the nose. Otherwise, perhaps a more daring beast arrests your attention - the thrill of a shock, a realistic effect that becomes indistinguishable from fantasy, its creative charm ... there are many reasons to love Zoologist, none of which are more appropriate than the other.
This is niche perfumery: interesting and loved for many reasons, appealing to many different tastes and styles. In this wilderness survival guide, we explore the many reasons why the Zoologist brand is so extraordinary, and in the process, outlining the many forms of appreciation it is rightly worthy of.
Finding Your Creature: Personality and Style
Any creature is valid subject matter for Zoologist, crafted by perfumers with distinctive yet recognisable styles. We can only image how things would look if multiple perfumers scented the same animal, or a fantasy creature - a unicorn, a dragon, a hippogriff? Nonetheless, each creature becomes a magnificent character, filled with life and personality.
Rhinoceros, for instance, is a solitary beast, reserved but powerful, its bold tobacco note at once connects it to arid savannahs and shrublands but also its latent explosive power. Calm and cautious, this is a quiet yet imposing animal, much like many humans we happen to know and love.
Hummingbird in contrast is drunk on life and the pollen of many colourful flowers and nectareous fruits. It is gregarious, passionate, fast, and it lives up to its symbolic association with joy. Vibrant notes of lilac, mimosa, rose, cherry, honeysuckle, amongst many others, form a bursting fragrance - and create an image of a bird that's the life of the party.
Each Zoologist fragrance is a portrait, which becomes a mirror that one may see themselves reflected in. More than a matter of taste and preference, it is possible to be beguiled by a personality as it echoes oneself. This is a beautiful and highly impactful basis towards electing a new fragrance.
Habitat and Taxonomy
Winged, hooved, furred, feathered, or tentacled, the multiple creatures of the Zoologist range belong to their respective habitats and families - and these qualities are signified through scent.
For example, Zoologist's avian creatures are marked by a fluffy featheriness: a familial resemblance that begins with a predominant white musk note bathed in warm and soft notes, such as powdered snow in Snowy Owl, soft mosses and herbs in Northern Cardinal, or even a fantasy of glistening dust and Champagne sparkles in Cockatiel. This shared musk note transforms into a powerful olfactory symbol for the avian and the spaces they inhabit - the softness of their feathers, the rhythm of their winged movement ... This is an impressive work of olfactory semiotics.
Another example: the tropical creatures of Zoologist, like Dodo and Sloth, celebrate the rawness of an variegated earth. These scents never forget the fact of their animal nature, as waves of funk and musk work the scent. In Sloth, a mushroom note with the softly sweet warmth of honied chamomile keeps the creature connected to the rainforest, offset with the faint bitterness of myrrh. It respects the organic state of nature - it sees pleasure in strange funkiness. And in Dodo (Jackfruit), you can visualise the flightless bird dashing through a warm earth strewn with flowers, fruits, and herbs, including lavender, patchouli, and tonka bean.
All of this goes to show that Zoologist is a brand with consistency and vision; a brand with eminent collectability. Linger in your preferred habitat, and you're bound to find another favourite. Enter a new one, and find a transformed world entirely. Perfumes like this implore you to don your safari hat (or snorkel): they become exercises in journeying through different complexes of scent.
Dare to Be Bold
Niche perfumery attracts all sorts of patterns of interest, some collecting for the purposes of finding some of the strangest, wildest, and most curious smells in a bottle - whether they're worn is another matter altogether.
And what would a brand full of animals be without an array of animalic scents? Some ferocious and others quiet yet powerful, even the beloved Bee has an animalic tilt, as its honied beeswax note has a genuinely rustic feel amongst its layers of sweetness. It draws out the beaming potency of floral notes, innately animalic with a saturated feeling. Musk Deer, in contrast, assembles the gamut of musk notes (white, vegetal, animalic) to produce a marvellously purposive scent, furthered with oud, patchouli, and sandalwood features, beating amongst a flesh made of jasmine sambac and rose. Musk Deer tames these notes and respects their power, and this is carried over with Hyrax and T-Rex.
Let's consider Hyrax, which celebrates the oft neglected hyraceum note. In this composition, it is hot fur in the sweltering sun and heat radiating off scorched rocks. It is intense, and Hyrax is a perfume of thresholds, working with an animalic accord also consisting of civet and castoreum. This is Zoologist’s most animalic fragrance to date, and an initially ferocious energy fades to reveal layers of Turkish rose, pepper, and spices. Its rareness produces strangeness, and its intensity lasts, and lasts, and lasts. And if this style interests you, we've assembled a Strange & Wild Beasts Sample Pack which features 6 scents that'll make you ponder, and certainly feel something.
Whether you like it or not, it commands respect. Perfumes like this induce a state of aesthetic reflection unique to the world of art and its appreciation. Zoologist is the perfect case in point for the artistic movement of fragrance – even better because they can be intimately be worn.
Let the Creature Come to You
We can never truly anticipate a surprise - if we did, then it wouldn't be a surprise! Sometimes all we have is a vague idea, as we await a sensation of pleasure to tell us that we're onto the right fragrance. We're well aware of this, and we've done some taxonomy work of our own with a number of Zoologist Sample Packs. We implore you to try every fragrance, to live with each creature properly - there's no technique more appropriate than this. Allow a surprise to happen - let the creature come to you!
Amongst many favourites of my own, from Bee, Musk Deer, Elephant, Dodo (Jackfruit) - all of these scents come together in a curated Editor's Sample Pack - it was Harvest Mouse that was the most authentic surprise, offering me the most delight. Replete with warm malty grains, chamomile, and a CO2 extracted beer note, it is a brilliant scent that celebrates autumnal flavours and smells. It is, indeed, a little cottagecore. These yeasty, estery, bready-like fragrances all too often descend into cloying sweetness or tackiness, and Harvest Mouse retains its integrity and sophistication. It is gourmand here and there, and it is done right. The sun warms and kisses its woody material, and Harvest Mouse becomes the most precise of imaginative images: long rays of sunlight landing on and infusing bales of hay, wheat, and wood. Over time, its warmth extracts an incomparable aroma.
What can I say? It just spoke to me.