Sainte Cellier, the London based online niche perfumery have collaborated with perfumer Nata Dyshliuk, founder and perfumer at Kyiv’s Sentire Perfumes. Nata and her partner, Alex, recently relocated to the UK due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Brooke Beldon, founder of Sainte Cellier tells us, “Sentire x Sainte Cellier will be an ongoing collaboration, which we’ve kicked off with four fragrances I chose from Nata’s portfolio: Atelier 14, English Garden, Smoked Plum Tea and Tobacco Sun.” – here are Sainte Cellier’s notes on the fragrances:
Smoked Plum Tea
Smoked Plum Tea begins with a whoosh of darkest black tea, filling the senses with a smouldering fog of wood stoves and ambiguous witchcraft. It is undoubtedly a black tea scent, with lapsang and China Caravan vapours and the fumy bloodline of scorched hearths.
Black tea perfumes are magical things, they are a way of wearing smokiness without the usual ecclesiastical spectrum of opoponax, myrrh and frankincense. Plum and nutty saffron are perfect partners to the tea, lending hints of bruised burgundy fruit and basmati rice. In fact, the plum leans toward the texture and liqueur stickiness of glossy prunes or dried plums as they are now called in the US. A mix of fresh squishy fruit and the chewy dried ones that need softening before use.
Smoked Plum Tea mellows beautifully, a touch of osmanthus and its apricot yoghurt profile plus the scorched pollen and liquorice of immortelle. The final leathery stages are gently smoked, wrapped in mate absolute and guaiac wood, adding just enough phenolic fumes to briefly illuminate the journey of that lovely black tea and plummy spices.
Tobacco Sun
Tobacco Sun is a sensual take on tobacco. Soaked in Armagnac and pirate rum, emphasising the ripe moreishness of plum and dark dulce de leche flavoured dates. Dried fruits and honey are flavoured delicately with cloves and cinnamon as Tobacco Sun sets into its beautiful foundations of tonka, tolu and benzoin, all notes with differing facets of vanilla-baked hay and blond tobacco.
The drydown is exemplary; shifting, twisting and evolving to showcase the sensual architecture of Tobacco Sun with lovely persistence and fumy grace.
Tobacco Sun is an eccentric, sensual take on tobacco, increasingly one of the most popular notes in modern perfumery. Not the ashen recoil of cigarettes, but the moist strands of rolling and pipe tobacco that used to be stored in old, stained jars with black Bakelite lids. The days of small murky old-fashioned tobacconists and shelves of jars have long gone. Obviously smoking is not to be encouraged, but the memories gathered in the very grain and stone of these lost places was delicious.
Plum has been used here too. Soaked in Armagnac and pirate rum, emphasising the ripe moreishness of plum and dark dulce de leche flavoured dates. Dried fruits and honey are flavoured delicately with cloves and cinnamon, two potentially overpowering materials, but the dry medicinal vibe is pared back as Tobacco Sun sets into its beautiful foundations of tonka, tolu and benzoin, all notes with differing facets of vanillic hay and blond tobacco. The drydown is exemplary. All perfumes should really shift, twist, evolve and showcase the sensual architecture of compositions. Linear scents, blocky naturals, inverted pyramids; all these sound intriguing but the truth is they often just fall apart on skin or sections overwhelm each other.
One of the key details to this Sentire x Sainte Cellier collection is the style and strength of drydown. They have distinctive journeys from head to base and you really pick this up. A favourite thing is the constant catching of perfume wisps and realising, it is you the wearer that smells so fine. Despite the nature of perfumery, this is a lot rarer than you might think.
Tobacco Sun is a perfume of plummy, boozy smoke and the Christmas cake richesse of fruits, spices and vanilla.. Not an easy thing to balance, but it works so well, with lovely persistence and fumy grace.
English Garden
Wow. Abstract garden meets formal beds and floral rooms. Snapped stems, crushed vegetation, pruning, coppicing and stained old leather gloves. A garden gone to seed, once ornamental, savage, sprawling over beds, borders and balding stone paths navigating through thickets and overgrown verdancy.
Instead of destruction, there is a sense of modernistic gardening imposed, subtle tweaking, rooms redecorated in textured blooms that ooze perfume and colours that shades of green that dazzle and camouflage. The air itself seems jade, emerald, malachite and lime in effluvium, providing a backdrop for English Garden, a spiky aromatic modern echo of a classic fougère, one of the oldest and most respected styles in perfumery.
English Garden’s style of piquant garden green is difficult to get right, the various odours of grassy lushness can get muddied, creating a dun-coloured ground that dulls the effects of any accompanying notes. But English Garden mixes warm lush summer vibes with hazy stone, torn basil, freshly cut grass, the pissy astringency of blackcurrant leaf with odours of a decaying greenhouse, pungent tomato leaves pushing against cracked mossy grass and a whiff of crumbling growbags. The air is chlorophyll stained, seed heads gone to seed, an abandoned fig tree fruits indulgently, the leaves fragrant in the summer air.
Creamy lily of the valley, hay and vetiver round out a portrait of an English garden, tipping into wilderness yet somehow, amid the foliate composition there is a notable rigidity of composition, a brutalist verdigris that supports and illuminates the materials. As with the other three perfumes in this collaborative collection, it has excellent persistence and introduces just enough romantic powder in the final stages.
Atelier 14
A hissing, starched and metallic perfume that captures the chalk, threads, antique fabric shears, cut, stitch and pressing of quality tweed, wool twill and cotton. Amongst this masculine bouquet of sensations there are clever little nods to an haute couture workshop, hints of subtle seamstress perfumes, embroidery, lace, satin, organza and the luxurious nap of velvet.
There is a definite gentlemanly character to Atelier 14, but as with all things, androgyny in scent, that Dietrich in a tuxedo spirit, makes it intriguing to wear. It is also a love letter to lavender, grown-up lavender, once an ever-present dandy in nearly all classic fougère fragrances. Many people dislike lavender but used with elan and know-how it can smell so aromatic and sensual, evoking fragrant purple bracts and whorls in the Provençal sun or lavandin, another deeply aromatic genus that has higher terpene levels, smelling more camphoraceous and metallic.
In Atelier 14, lavender is seared with mineral notes, soapy green sage and bergamot. The stony, flinted top note provides an overall sense of pressed cloth as it persists into the base of clean wool, musks and the milky haze of cedarwood. Iron is a cold, strange metal, rusted or heated in sunlight the metal has a ferrous sharpness. Scissors and fabric shears, forged for centuries from iron, now mixed with carbon and other materials to created steel, develop an oiled weather that is part of that creative atelier vibe.
Iris is one of loveliest and most subtle materials in Atelier 14. If you spray it expecting the classic rooty powder and silken gauze of traditional iris work, you may be disappointed. However, it is the bruised subterfuge of the iris rhizome that slowly diffuses through the construction, creating a beautiful tension between the floral elements and the abstractions of wool, hot iron and minerality that opens the perfume.
Brooke tells us, “We’re also working on the next three perfumes in the Sentire x Sainte Cellier collection, which will be called Seulement en Rêves. These are indulgent dives into perfume classicism.”
As well as Sentire, Sainte Cellier aims to bring unique niche perfumes to the UK, with brands such as Maria Zappas, Marlou, Eris, Les Indémodables, Les Abstraits, Iconofly, Rubini and Isabelle Larignon. You can find out more on the Sainte Cellier website here.
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