Poof!
Fzotic (Bruno Fazzolari) (2023)

I smell mostly tuberose and ylang, topped with a brash mix of stuff which I don't think works too well.

There's mint, soap, some sort of unnameable fruit, cassis, and something that causes all of this to come together to smell like a very old fashioned bathroom scrubbing liquid. Honestly, it's the cassis that's irking me, with its awkward bile/cat pee darkness.

I can see the exploration of contradictions that this is - sharp vs smooth, edible vs inedible, clean vs dirty. And I should note that Bruno knows his way around combining tuberose and Ylang, as previously demonstrated in his Room 237. In comparison, Room 237 takes its flowers to a warm beach, while Poof takes them to a bathroom (it's a fancy museum bathroom, though!). I'm voting neutral because the cassis biles things up, though I'll reiterate that Room 237 shares the best parts of this and does it better.

There is something about Bruno Fazzolari the rubs me the wrong way. He's currently on a promotional campaign that's springing up on Instagram touting the virtues of the perfumer, including one where he asserts that perfumers "are not allowed to wear perfume" and other such inflated nonsense. Be that is it may, I try my darnedest to separate the artist, as insufferable as they may seem to be, from their art. And just like that: POOF! I come across a sample of this and I figured I'd give it a go.

Sure enough, I can't get on with this, either. There's something so daft about it, as if it were made to be just as smarmy as its creator, but coming off as hopelessly synthetic. Something about it feels like Bath and Body Works on an acid trip, so fruity-floral, screechy and frothy, verging on headache-inducing. Green apple is a hard note to ace—and Fazzolari did not succeed. It penetrates along with the harsh tuberose. After smelling something so thoughtful and nuanced as Piguet Zazen recently, with its apple-skin top note, this is the airhorn to Zazen's Tibetan bell. It's absolutely hideous.

Oh well, so much for that.