Hi there Posse! Sometimes many of us hard core perfumistas need to smell of the beast. To be completely taken over, cloaked in the primal pelt of fragrance. I admit freely to you that animalics are a great love of mine. The more outrageous the better. Byredo M/Mink (got a bottle), Serge Lutens Muscs Koublai Khan (got an old export bottle with the Palais Royale pic), AbdesSalaam Attar Oud Caravan 3 (yep, have a small bottle of this too) and the Olympic Orchids DevilScent Project (got me again). So when I smelled Peau de Bete I knew I needed a bottle to go in my collection. A recent achievement and one I’m thrilled with. It’s not available retail in Australia sadly.

Here Patty explains the rise of SKANK as a positive fragrant adjective.

Not everyone will love Peau de Bete, and they’re not supposed to. It’s an uber niche representation of fragrance. Somehow, though, it has become a successful fragrance and is still available in most places you can find Les Liquides Imaginaires. It’s definitely worth looking for, even if you just screw up your nose and go EWWWWWW!

Peau de Bete by Les Liquides Imaginaires

Fragrantica gives these featured accords:
Top: Cumin, saffron, chamomile, black pepper, parsley
Heart: Atlas cedar, guaiac wood, juniper, Texas cedar, cypriol oil or nagarmotha, styrax, ambrarome, grass, amyris, patchouli leaf, patchouli
Base: Castoreum, civet

Sweaty steam room with a slight mould problem contrasted with the sizzle of black pepper and woods. There is the tainted smell of something feral and dark, unwashed and rank underlying the sweet, dank patchouli and caustic minty woodiness of juniper and cedar. Add in some bed head and slow flowing creek water, the sweat urinous smell of a cats patch and shake all of that together.

You’d expect it to be stomach turning, right?

Nope. Couldn’t be further from the truth. All these smells are somehow warming, comforting and safe.

You know where it takes me? It takes me to the nights I would be ill as a child. They weren’t often, I was a breaker of bones and lander on sharp objects from ridiculous heights rather than sick. Some of those nights I would be smelling the stench of my unwashed sickness and Mum would come in half asleep every couple of hours to check on me, also a dishevelled sweaty mess. The combined smell of our rankness as she nursed me and held me is kind of the way this makes me feel. Taken to the nth degree.

Are you a lover of the dark, dank side of fragrance?
Portia xx

Portia also writes for Australian Perfume Junkies