An intriguing menagerie of dashingly depicted beasts grace the front of Zoologist fragrances – a US [ed. Canadian] niche collection we were thrilled to come across when founder Victor Wong kindly sent some samples. Civet is a plunge into caddish murkiness, using no animal ingredients yet achieving great depth. Perfumer Shelley Waddington evokes a clandestine clinch with heliotrope shot through with black coffee and a prowling base of leather, moss and musk.
A couple of years ago, Toomo Inaba left Tokyo for a quieter life in Kyushu’s countryside, where he continues his work as a fragrance reviewer, producer, and self-taught perfumer. Although Nightingale is his own official debut scent (launched in October), he has in fact created 50-odd private blends over the past several years, and his company Zoologist features a range of deluxe fragrances by different perfumers. He describes his inspiration for the pink floral chypre as coming from an ancient Japanese poem, picking out one line in particular: “Soon you will be wearing a black robe and enter nunhood. You will not know each rosary bead has my tears on it.” The notes include plum blossom, agarwood, patchouli and moss.
January 27th, 2017, by Mandy Lynn. For Original Post Click Here
Zoologist's Beaver is mentioned in the 2016 December issue of Elle Croatia!
"Ljepotica i zvijer" (Beauty and the Beast), written by Ivo Parać.
"Zoologist Beaver - Samo ako ste ‘hrabar kao dabar’, odvažit ćete se i probati ovaj parfem inspiriran mirisom te životinje. Kod jednih izaziva užas, kod drugih smijeh. Iz mog iskustva izaziva samo komplimente."
(Translation: Zoologist Beaver, only if you are brave like the Beaver, dare yourself to try this perfume which is inspired by the smell of animals. Some find it horrendous, others funny, from my experience its only been compliments.)
Whether it's an OBJECT D'ART or a clue in a criminal case, the latest PERFUME innovations are truly cinematic. By Katie Dickens
When conceptualizing Zoologist, Toronto-based founder Victor Wong looked to the animal kingdom – but the scents are a far cry from Anchorman's Sex Panther. "The original inspiration came from animal musks, which have been used in perfumery since the beginning," says Wong. Rather than synthesizing the aroma of particular fauna, he works with perfumers to construct "olfactive associations." To wit: Nightingale conjures the tiny, singing birds with Japanese plum blossom, oud and patchouli.
By RACHEL SYME OCT. 25, 2016
In 2012, Victor Wong, a video game designer for a toy company in Toronto, had a tiny midlife crisis in his hotel room while on vacation. He felt burned out on work but was strangely revived by sniffing the hotel toiletries, which came from a niche fragrance line he can no longer recall.
What he does remember is that he swooned over the scents, which were spicy, musky and intense. He knew then and there that he wanted to make perfume.
Returning home, Mr. Wong began haunting the message boards of the cult perfume sites BaseNotes and Fragrantica, feverishly researching the formulas behind his favorite scents. The same notes kept popping up: castoreum, civet, musk, ambergris. He realized that he was drawn, in an instinctual way, to animal-derived scents — or rather (because most perfumery materials that come from animals are now banned or heavily regulated) to their lab-created chemical equivalents.
When Mr. Wong worked up the courage to put out an open call online for a perfumer to help him create his fragrance, he already had a specific, and beastly, concept in his head. He would call his line Zoologist, and he would release a series of scents named for the wild creatures that inspired them.
The British perfumer Chris Bartlett was the first to respond, with a bold idea for the maiden fragrance in the Wong menagerie. He wanted to capture the essence of a beaver. Mr. Bartlett proposed a scent that used no real animal ingredients, but smelled strongly of wet fur, dank musk, felled trees and the sour buttery odor of a beaver’s castor sac secretions.
Mr. Wong said yes immediately. When Beaver hit the market in 2014, it immediately became a polarizing sensation in the niche perfume world. CaFleureBon, which reviews cult perfumes, named it one of the best of the year, and fans flocked to its peppery, sweaty funk. But, as Mr. Wong now admits, “it was ultimately too challenging for a lot of people.”
“A lot of people thought it was interesting but said that they would never wear it,” he said. The smell of damp pelt (and the not-so-subtle bodily connotations of the name) made some customers feel uncomfortable rather than swaddled in the dense odor.
So Mr. Wong asked Mr. Bartlett to revisit his formula, and this fall they released Beaver 2016, a riff on the original idea but with more “fresh air and river top notes to make it more attractive.”
Mr. Wong has released six other perfumes, including Bat, a pungent reverie on banana, cave dirt, musk and overripe figs from the perfumer Dr. Ellen Covey that won the top prize at the 2016 Art and Olfaction Awards. The venerable fragrance critic Luca Turin gave Bat a rave, writing that “the fragrance seems lit from within by the earth note all the way to drydown.”
It turns out that Mr. Wong’s animal instincts were right along: In 2016, the demand for fauna-inspired scents is cresting.
“Animalic” is a buzzword floating around the industry, now that the minimalist, clean trend has given way (at least in high-fashion niche circles) to more feral fragrance clouds. Maybe it’s the desire of millennials to reclaim their beastly odors in an age of technological detachment, but fragrance buyers are newly excited to smell as if they come from an elegant zoo.
Victor Wong of Toronto-based Zoologist Perfumes is so inspired by the animal kingdom that his entire perfume collection celebrates it. In 2013, Wong was just a lover of scent with a day job. He took to the internet to seek out a perfumer who could help him actualize his dream to start his own fragrance brand. He found two via a fragrance forum and started out on his journey. Each Zoologist scent is named for an animal, its formulation designed to conjure the essence and idiosyncrasies of each species. For fall, the natural choice is Bat, an earthy, mineral fragrance layered with dark plum, leather and musk.
Cosmetics Magazine (Spring 2015) has coverage on Zoologist Perfumes.
