Kanat
Angela Ciampagna (2015)

Profile Of A Young Woman by Giovanni Boldini

Kanat has such diffusive musks that its striking opening registers somewhere between hairspray and child-friendly glue. There's a foamy almond bittersweetness to it, and a glow of very light, mimosa-like florals. It's appealingly amorphous, all its pale colours seeping into one other in a swirling white mist, like the cover of some lost Boards of Canada album.
A true saffron note emerges and then ducks below one's perception and then re-emerges and ducks through its course. Note to Ms Ciampagna – please release a saffron-heavy offering, you've got it so right here, but it's all too peekaboo to satisfy saffron fiends like me.
There's a gentle peachy fruitiness to the odour profile – something I don't perceive on my skin, but which is evident in the small room test I put perfumes through. This involves wearing in a closed small room, leaving it and re-entering to get the ambient aura of the perfume.
I found Kanat's abstraction and elusiveness intriguing, a prompt to one's olfactory imagination rather than a guided tour. Yes, there is the humidity and salt suggested by Ciampagna's description of this one as being ‘from ancient cisterns', but its sprawling formlessness is wider than that. People who can't stand that kind of thing should probably avoid.

Kanat opens with a slightly sweet apricot and peach accord before gradually moving to its heart. As the composition enters its early heart the apricot vacates as remnants of the peach join sweet lily-of-the-valley and moderately powdery ylang-ylang florals as powder-heavy vanilla and slightly animalic musk rise from the base, joining a vague, slightly salty accord in support with faint hints of cedarwood peeping in and out. During the late dry-down the peach and florals vacate, leaving the now slightly powdery vanilla to mesh with remnants of the musk and modestly earthy patchouli through the finish. Projection is very good, and longevity excellent at around 12 hours on skin.

I am having a hard time figuring out Kanat. The apricot and peach in the top notes are pretty easy to identify and the apricot in particular is quite well-done and natural smelling (the peach to a degree, less-so). Once one gets to the key mid-section of the composition things get more difficult to place, as the complex florals are extremely well-blended to the point that identifying individual notes is quite difficult. I am relatively confident that there is some powdery ylang-ylang in the composition, but its presentation is different than one usually encounters with the note. Even more baffling is what can best be described as a salty accord that I have no idea from where it is derived, but it is there, as is an odd musky accord that every once and a while adds in a cedar-like facet resembling pencil shavings. The whole mid-section is extremely complex and confounding. At the end of the day I find it hard to describe what it really smells like, only that I don't like it. Getting past the troublesome heart, the late dry-down returns to more "normal" territory as the weird musky floral mixture mostly goes away, leaving a relatively tame vanilla and patchouli focused finish that is a welcome relief. The bottom line is Kanat has an interesting start and a pleasant finish, but its key mid-section is a befuddling complex mess, earning the composition a slightly "below average" 2 to 2.5 stars out of 5 and a mild avoid recommendation (especially to those who abhor powdery compositions).

I'm totally smitten with the opening of Kanat – it almost smells like a sheet of metal crossed with nail polish remover. It's so utterly strange, yet not unpleasant in the slightest. My guess is that it's the cassis that's responsible – a material which, if not handled right, imparts an obnoxious cat pee effect. It's so well managed here, though. Within minutes, it begins to smell more recognizably botanical and earthy with a fuzzy peach that sits perfectly in the blend. While it's hard to pinpoint what the florals are (jasmine?), they're present and definitely floral. The opening is seriously one of the most attention-getting things I've smelled in some time.

The disappointing part of this scent, though, is that the amazing opening sequence is strung over a mediocre vanilla base that shows up all too soon. Although it's not a bad base unto itself, it just doesn't convey any of the brilliance of the opening, and it ends up smelling too much like ice cream. Personally, I think a watery, earthy base would have suited this more, but I suspect the vanilla makes this easier for people to handle and gives more support where support is needed. The result though, is that the scent has the strangest transitional phases that simply don't make sense.

Whereas others in the line remind me considerably of Rania J, this one reminds me a great deal of the style you find in Soivohle – acrobatic transitions and really inventive combinations. In fact, as Kanat winds its way down to the base, it smells a bit like Soivohle's Dog Star – which has a distinct vanilla ice cream feel to it as well. This is worth smelling for the opening alone, and even though I found the base to be a let down, it's still a solid base to have. If nothing else, Kanat a testament to what this perfumer can do and the kind of ideas she's putting out there.

Angela Ciampagna Kanat is an extremely spicy, almondy and apricot veined olfactory poetry. This fragrance is full of aristocratic romanticism indeed, opening so wet, luxurious, regal, hesperidic and ylang/ylang-black currant nuanced while ending down towards a balmy-musky vanillic final stage with a stable almond/medlar nut undertone (or better...main mark). I fully agree with Alfarom since I detect for a while an unmistakable medicinal saffron's presence (connected with woody resins, which I tend to "suffer") and a sort of glue-like tone probably afforded by acacia and fir resins. The dry down becomes gradually really silky/velvety and rounded, the sweetness recedes, patchouli emerges, the "apothecary" saffron's effect tends to subside and an almost edible-tasty and nutty balminess (a la Xerjoff Join The Club: Ivory Route or More Than Words) finally blooms up with all its charge of floral subtle sparks, yummy milky/almondy syrup, white vegetal sticky lymph and musks. An extremely sensual and all at once diaphanous and "Neo-Victorian" uncompromisingly feminine concoction straight from the Angela Ciampagna Theca Olfactoria.

Kanat is quite a nostalgic fragrance in my personal experience. I'm probably completely off here but upon application, I can't help it from being immediately teleported to when I was a kid in school and, more precisely, the smell of Coccoina. A kid-safe and extremely popular italian glue which had a fantastic and quite unmistakeable almondy smell. Now, given the notes disclosed, the only thing that could make me remotely think of almonds is probably acacia but it might still be kind of a stretch. Anyway, Coccoina and those days spent cutting images from magazines for doing collages. The warmth of mid-may sun, long days of light and a sense trepidation for the incoming vacations.

Kanat is all of that for me. It's an evocation of my childhood.

Beside Coccoina, I smell smooth florals, a hint of medicinal saffron and a soft white musky / vanillic base. Not a fragrance I'm crazy for but if you're drawn to light florals with a twist, give this a chance.

As with most other fragrances in this line, Kanat never feels cheap or even rushed and it's pretty original too without going necessarily for the weird route.