Last week I wrote that my scent twin sent me a little package full of goodness. It contained a few things; last week I wrote about De profundis. This time it’s a gem by a man who’s brilliance I find almost frightening, Chistopher Brosius.
Frightening because some of his perfumes to me are so shockingly like my own memories that it feels, well, weird is the nicest way of putting it. Like At the Beach 1966 from his Secret History series. It’s so Tom at the beach circa 1977 that I feel like some weird mind-ray had been used on me. I do own and love and adore his musk reinvention, and dearly wish there was a place in Los Angeles where all of these were available to play with, or I could hit the damned Lotto and just spend a few weeks in Williamsburg at his store.
In any case, 7 Billion Hearts is at it’s heart a vanilla scent. I took a while for me to get to the point where I like vanilla in scents, even though I pretty much fell for Guerlain Spiriteuse Double Vanille immediately and finally popped for a full bottle. But where SDV is a happily boozy, doughy kind of scent (it makes me think of baking something in a white marble kitchen on a bright spring day), 7 Billion Hearts is far darker and far more intimate. It starts with a roar of a wood fire, one of those notes that Brosius is unmatched at. As the fires die back, the vanilla comes to the fore, not coldly aged in vodka, but seemingly in cognac- mellow, warm and rich.
If SDV is the white marble kitchen you happily knead away in, 7 Billion Hearts is the library you and your lover retire to after dinner to enjoy the fire on that metaphorical cool spring evening, banking fires in both the hearth and the heart..
7 Billion Hearts is available at the Brooklyn Gallery or at the CB Website, $30 for 2ML (which will honestly last you a while) or $225 for 15ML, My sample was provided by my Scent Twin, who’s lovely review you can read here. Image from CB website.
Tom, this sounds simply amazing. Another one of CB’s scents that I’ve got to sample; also must try the At the Beach. Thanks for the nice review!
Oh! You’ve made this sound fantastic. Like you, I used to loathe vanilla in perfume, but I’m coming around. And this one sounds utterly divine. Wood fire, vanilla, cognac, all in a library with my lover? Yup, that’s the life I want. But I’ll settle for the perfume.
I agree with you about At the Beach 1966; that was the scent of summer throughout the ’70s. Glorious. I have a little 2ml bottle of it that has lasted forever. Summer just wouldn’t be summer without it.
AAaaarrggghhhh! Give it back interwebz… :Bully:
Wood fires, cognac and libraries? Oh yes, please! Christopher Brosius is fantastic and does have an eerie ability to capture ‘scent snapshots’ as if you could just walk into a photograph of that time in your life and experience it fully all over again. Thanks for a wonderful review, Tom!
Where is my moon???