Orto Parisi Stercus Parfum

It has a unique character that is mysterious.

three noses in the room and three different perfumes.
me: intriguing. my partner: sharpie. my daughter: bad. that's the house working as intended, i think. alessandro gualtieri wants you to have a reaction, he doesn't especially care which one.
my opening was liquorice and aniseed, which i was not expecting from something called stercus. dark, complex, quiet, not sweet, not smoky, hard to place. nothing about it is foregrounded enough to grab onto, it just hovers there being strange. i liked it. given where black afgano landed for me (filthy, bad man smells, never again) this was a genuine surprise. stercus is the cleaner, more refined cousin and it shows, it's abstract and restrained where black afgano is just filthy.
then my partner said it smells like a sharpie on you and that was the end of my sovereignty over the experience.
because he's kind of right. the aldehyde-oud-leather thing does have a solvent edge, a WD-40 quality, and once he named it i couldn't unname it. i spent the rest of the wear oscillating between "really nice" and "sharpie." hours later i'd catch a quiet whiff of something dark and lovely and then the marker would walk back into the room. two coexisting truths, and the sharpie had contaminated the nice.
this is the thing about smell and language: once someone gives you the word, the word eats the perfume. i don't think i can un-sharpie this, which means i can't wear it, which means it doesn't matter that the opening was actually intriguing and the base is actually interesting. not a scrubber. not bad. just lost to association.

Animalistic? For sure! It's an exciting scent, with over the top masculine musks of every kind.

Forget the flowers... who needs em'? This is a NSFW intense scent that hits hard in a 'dirty secret' kind of way.
This is a scent for umm... intimate occasions...or to give off the vibe that you've already been there and done that.

My biggest problem with finding a new sent is everything smells like something I’ve smelt before Stercus is NEW and Diffrent . I actually love the fact that it starts off “stinking “ then to develop into such a unique memorable lasting sent !

READ REVIEW BEFORE PURCHASING! This perfume is a unique one.. Stercus is Latin for poop.. generally perfumes are nice smelling and for once someone has had the balls to make something that is not. This smells like I've been working in the garden covered in dirt for a week or more, out on the town for a wild one and then hungover in bed for a weekend... with no shower and perhaps a spray of patchouli to mask the stench. This is in no way, black afghano's cousin... this is raw anamalistic dirt. In my opinion it stinks to high heaven and I could never wear it. Kudos if your brave enought to go out in public with this on... despite the fact I find it unwearable, it is radically outside the norm, breaks all my notions of what a perfume SHOULD smell like and is art in a bottle. Oh and it's silage is equally as beastly...