Black Pepper & Sandalwood
Acca Kappa (2014)

The fragrance's style (vaguely victorian, artistic and colonial) conjures me partially the Floris/Crabtree & Evelyn/Etro's ones but the general refinement and articulation are not so marked. This juice is all about sandalwood and pungent spices (black pepper, saffron and ginger in particular) and a few more. Development is dull and short on time while a weird sense of wet crudeness (probably provided by ginger, cumin or kurkuma and which I dislike) permeates the elements. Rose? Not under my profane nose. Dry down is lot focused on nutmeg and cinnamon. The plenty of piquant spices provides a sort of arabesque undertone. A luxurious palatin decadent concept, a fragrance for Carnival-parties and nocturnal baroquesque rendez vous.

This was an Art and Olfaction Awards 2015 Winner, which begs the question of whether professional critics give a damn about performance beyond a scratch-and-sniff test. Being a fan of both pepper and sandalwood, the fundamental elements of the pyramid for Black Pepper & Sandalwood looked very attractive to me, and the extended (supposed) notes suggested that it should have more layers than the strata of Pompeii. Because of this, along with curiosity engendered by the award itself, I made a blind buy. When it first came in, I gave it a back-of-the-hand test and really thought something was very much amiss. After a spicy opening there was virtually no scent within an hour. Saturating the back of my hand yielded only a little more. Now that I have given it a full wearing, I can see that the performance, while vapid, isn't nonexistent. Still, the curtain lowers very quickly on the lively spicy pepper and dry cinnamon opening performance. Body heat generates low-grade lingering spice, but the wood base and much of the other supposed other stuffing here is ghostly -- one can only vaguely sense where it should be, but it remains essentially intangible. Of course I didn't much expect real sandalwood, but it looked like the elements of a constructed sandalwood accord were in place. Alas, no.

Without regard to how the critics apparently approached Black Pepper & Sandalwood, I don't think many real consumers, or at least not most of those on BN, apply to their fragrance preferences the biblical refrain about meekness/weakness ultimately winning out. How exactly did this win the Art and Olfaction Award? It remains a mystery to me, but perhaps the answer is somewhat akin to Samuel Johnson's comments about the positive reviews of Thomas Gray: “He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great.”