Wode
Boudicca (2008)

I could write a dissertation on this one, but I will spare all of you. Be that as it may, there is a lot to say about Boudicca Wode as it comes together incredibly so despite so many disparate elements. It also begs the question: what delineates natural from synthetic when it comes to scent? Here my left brain detects what I know are many synthetics, and my right brain is all in a flutter Bouddica Wode evokes in my mind, my memory. Natural doesn't necessarily mean "real" anymore than synthetic means "fake." Let me take you on a brief tour of this one...

Herbs and narcotic white florals are hedged by privet and boxwood, tart and pucker-lip berries staining the mouth and the nostrils, further and further into the woods and greens we go, yet we look below our feet and there's hot, fresh asphalt, we smell the hot sun baking it. Virginia Creeper crawling over the ground, its tell-tale five leaves, its tendrils curling around sinewy branches, embracing, just short of choking, a firm grip on the trees. English Ivy on the other hand, has been hacked away so as not to swallow the courtyard (and its groundskeeper), and it gives off a green, crunchy, damp aroma. There are bulbous bell peppers, crisp, saturated, undulating through prickly nettles and sticky weeds.

The green blends with mauve, puce, tints that signal ripeness, of fullness, and then there are shades of clay and brown. Psychedelic glowing cedar, huffing pencil sharpener and seeing the holy spirit kind of cedar, while concord grapes, elderberries, and chewing wood sorrel, pretending they are shamrocks, that's what I feel as we enter the core of Boudicca Wode. The summer fecundity of woodlands and greenery mingles with perspiration (cumin and saffron together lending a somewhat sour but addictive effect) and the magic of animal husbandry. Castoreum, musk, dirty daisies, tansy, teases one away from any idea that nature is immaculate.

This is Boudicca Wode in a nutshell. A perfect wear for near delirious hot summer days.

To use a technical term...STINKY

Nice scent for hangin' at Joe's Bar and Grill Sunday evening watching the Bears game, if Joe's has good grub. I don't scent anything feminine. May be a scent for butch women to try.

Appears to generate a variety of opinions. Either the juice or the bottle is a deep blue, hearkening to the mythic Celtic body paint. The scent is interesting, somewhat pleasant but outside my usual frames of reference. Airy, refreshing, sort of green-herbal in a non-natural way. Low-key, minimalist. Short longevity. Not dreadful, not compelling for me.

The opening of the new version of Boudicca Wode Scent instantly threw me right into an old rusty bottle of Nina Ricci Phileas I had once, which was completely ruined, the juice gone severely wrong. Wode smells of that, precisely: a vintage herbal-leather-musky scent gone wrong - metallic, harsh, moldy, filthy (not in a good way) and dry. It's also “inky” to some extent, and quite smoky too. Basically it smells like a sort of really dry, musky synthetic leather scent with musk and herbs, but all in a heavy, and to me, unpleasant way. Like “rotting”, but with a discomforting touch of clumsy. It may be intriguing and charming for fans of this type of scents: on me, it's a nasty scrubber. The drydown goes a bit better, and I must agree with deadidol on the similarity with Bois d'Ombrie. Still, well... no.

4,5/10

This review is for the original version of the scent (not the paint).

Geza Schoen is hit or miss with me, and this one's quite a miss–largely based on personal preference though as Wode contains accords that I rarely enjoy. This scent mixes green, vegetal notes with spices and a rubbery leather over a musky amber-ish base. If I had my way, juniper, cardamom, coriander, nutmeg, and sage would all be banned from perfumery, and that's much of what Wode contains. It's a convoluted melange of cooking spices and herbs over vaguely synthetic components (some kind of floral-ish accord, “leather” etc.) It's all funneled into a relatively cohesive and compact scent, but the end result is quite removed from the kind of thing I dig. If you're into smelling like something that strolled out of a country kitchen via an S&M club, then this could work for you. To me, it's very close to "scrubber."

P.S. I was trying to recall what this reminds me of and I just noticed someone else mentioned Bois' D'Ombre. That's it! Bag of rotten veggies, pretty much.