Reviews of Sova by Slumberhouse

I've known Sova for 2 years now, since I've got my decant. I've gone through different "stages" with it - from a total no-go, being neutral (a moment when I wrote my review) and finally I fell in love with it, and bought a bottle. It is an important scent to me.

Sova on my skin reminds me of rural landscape, bales, sheaves of hay in the field and men working and smoking pipe tobacco. There's a beehive in a nearby, a source of honey. By the way, Sova feels like it has quite a lot of beeswax on my skin too.

It's complex on my skin and a lot is going on through more than 10 hours of development. But main players on me are surely hay, beeswax, pipe tobacco and spices.

Also, I feel like Sova, along with Jeke are predecessors of latter compositions like Baque, Kiste or Mond.

Longevity is awesome - it varies, but as I've mentioned above - more than 10 hours is a standard. Projection is above average.

Sova is an epitome of fall to me - simply, fall in a bottle.

Sova has a common base with Kiste and Baque. I've probably come across such a scent in the kitchen. Maybe a food with special spices, or grape syrup or ...? whatever it is, it is very familiar. The dominant accord of Sova is a combination of hay and honey; But in practice, the green, hay-like scent that wafts through the air smells like dill. It is a green, syrupy, dark esculent combo. By the way, "hops" have been listed in the pyramid too, it's a plant that gives flavor to beer; with an almost spicy smell and a bitter taste. All-told, Sova smells natural, very special, but it's native, something like a local food. Sweet, herbal, warm and pungent. Very good projection and longevity, so that those around you can easily notice it. It's not an everyday or permanent perfume for me, but sometimes it will be attractive to use such perfumes.

I don't get the savory aspects so much with this. I mostly get smoky hay with sweet tobacco, possibly the plummy note others remark on. It's quite lovely, but the hay is a tiny bit barn yard in the opening and middle. Dry down is a gorgeous tobacco, like fruit flavored pipe tobacco. Really nice and yes, 100% unisex.

I am going to skip the usual objective note breakdown portion of the review, as Sova's notes all seem to blend together seamlessly to form an overall accord that at least on this writer's skin stays the same from start to finish. Projection is good and longevity is absolutely legendary at well over 24 hours on skin.

I haven't had a lot of luck with most Slumberhouse releases in the past, so it took me quite some time to get around to giving my Sova sample a real try on skin. Now having finally done so, the results are a bit of mixed bag. The overall development begins with a bit of a slightly sweet plum-like note before quickly morphing into its primary gourmand burnt sugar accord that stays constant through its finish. This burnt sugar accord has imortelle and prune-like facets, with even some pipe tobacco that make it smell different than caramel per se, but they are not in completely different ball parks. I can easily say that Sova is not my kind of perfume, but I can also respect it appealing to off the beaten path gourmand lovers to a degree. The bottom line is the $180 per 30ml bottle Sova is one of the best performing perfumes I have encountered from a longevity perspective, but the "above average" 2.5 to 3 stars out of 5 rated composition ultimately is not something that one most likely will want to wear, yielding it only a neutral recommendation except to Slumberhouse lovers that enjoy gourmands.

Stardate 20190131:

A different gourmand perfume but then that is expected from Slumberhouse.
It has the same syrupy resins that Josh loves but there are savory aspects to this Gourmand. Folks have compared it to Indian curry and they are right.
The tradition punjabi mango pickle use mustard oil, onion seeds and anise as preservative to pickle green unripe mango. The savory aroma of Sova is very similar to this pickle.
Josh has made sure to dial this down just right to keep this non pungent.
A great effort. I just can't wear this pickle :)

Sova is a nice foodie fragrance. It has a nice warmth and richness, and it smells interesting. It has a sweet spiciness. In moments, it smells like a ginger snap cookie, but it also has interesting complexity, and smells like much more - a delicious stew, for example, sweet and savory. There's also a hint of leather.

A couple more thoughts on what this smells like: maybe a sweet chai, or maybe a dish of Indian food with a fairly sweet sauce, such as korma.

I only obtained a bottle due to the limited re-release this August via Fumerie Parfumerie of Portland, OR, and I was fortunate to nab a bottle, breaking my general rule of not blind buying, especially fragrances on the more expensive side.

Sova's reputation, having been discontinued for a couple years, however, was the stuff of lore, and so I felt justified in going for it, and I'm not disappointed that I did.

Like the other Slumberhouse fragrances I own (Jeke, Ore, Norne), Sova is powerful and provocative, but it's a bit more daring, spicy, and even borderline animalic.

And like the others, while there is a woody commonality (woody dominance in the case of Norne, in fact), and a semblance of sweetness in Ore and Jeke, both qualities are present in Sova but are overwhelmed by the spicy, animalic mixture of hay, castoreum, and broom, giving it a sharper edge than the other fragrances in the lot.

Still, Sova is anchored by tonka and vanilla, both of which keep it from flying off the rails as a wild spicy and dirty potion.

Sova pushes the envelope from what I already considered bold, daring scents in Slumberhouse, but I'm pleased that it's still a sophisticated enough blend that I'd feel comfortable wearing it in a few situations. Yet at the same time, it's a bit too daring and edgy for a first impression or early date, but a little loud to wear privately, so it's hard to select an ideal occasion for wearing it, but no matter: I'll find the time to wear it, albeit sparingly.

It almost doesn't need mentioning, but Sova has the same superlative performance like its fellow Slumberhouse dark juice brethren, on the extreme high end in terms of both projection and longevity, a testament to the juice's value at $160 for 30ml.

If you come across this, do check it out! A staple of the line and one I'm glad to have added to my collection.

8 out of 10

Interesting to read the reviews on Sova. My experience has been a good one, but I haven't smelled many of the things I've read that others have.

Sova opened with a very nice caramel smell, but one that had a strange note as well. It took me a moment to recognize it, but I finally realized it smelled like a burning smell, and to be more accurate, like the smell the belt on my vacuum has when it's slipping and starts to burn a little. It was a strange smell, but it didn't last too long, and once it was gone, Sova just smelled so wonderful all day. To me, Sova smells like caramel popcorn. Not just like caramel popcorn, there are spices going on as well, but this caramel popcorn smell is the bomb. It's an ultra buttery caramel popcorn. Absolutely delicious smelling to my nose. Sova seemed very linear to me once the slight burned rubber smell left. The rest of the day the buttery caramel corn smell hung with me, and I really enjoyed it a lot. I'd love to have a bottle of Sova in my collection. Excellent fragrance in my opinion.

This is a bit of a strange creature. On me, this smells of baked apples, and something watery and syrupy (like canned fruit cocktail) and the lit end/ashes from a cigarette (burnt and dry). The ashiness is pretty prominent and is quite strong, but after 30 minutes it dials back a bit. Don't get me wrong, it's still the main thing that I smell...but at least it doesn't smell quite so much like I've been rolling in an ash tray or covered in paper that's on fire. In the back of it I can smell this metallic fruit cocktail (straight out of the can, complete with juiciness of the syrup) and a hint of baked apples. It's also starting to develop a soft "boozy" quality, I think maybe brandy? All in all, I like this weird little scent adventure! It's not very high on my purchase list, but it's something that I will enjoy the sample while I have it.

Slumberhouse perfumer Josh Lobb has said that he doesn't work with topnotes. Most of his perfumes smell layered, as if materials with similar consistencies or densities were creating a ‘wall of scent.' Materials meet each other head to head on a level playing field. The democracy of materials urges you to find your own understanding of the perfumes without being steered along a particular course. By contrast, a traditional top/heart/base has a momentum that guides your attention more explicitly. If you favor traditional perfume, Sova might seem as if it lacks movement. On the other hand, if you prefer the ‘wall of scent' approach, a traditional pyramidal structure could seem programatic, like a theme-park ride that, for all its thrills and drama, is still a passive experience.

I have no horse in this race and think that both approaches can be effective. The issue is how successfully a perfume accomplishes its goals. Sova is an excellent example of Lobb's method. It has no topnotes per se and questions the premise that a perfume without a top-to-bottom structure is “linear”, that is to say, static. By asking the wearer to participate in order to make sense of the perfume, Lobb's perfumes tip the balance from observation to interpretation. The perfume is less an artifact and more the entry point to an adventure.

Sova appears gourmand at first sniff and aromas come into focus as flavors. The herbal moistness of tobacco and hay. A bitter honeycomb made from hops and clover. Cold/hot spices like clove and allspice.

If I try to chase down the specific gourmand facets, they take me somewhere vaguely inedible–woods, bitter herbs, resins. Sova's imagery is elusive if you squint too hard to bring it into focus. To paraphrase a new age expression that used to make me apoplectic, Let Go and Let Sova. The imagery works best as a gestalt, not zooming in on the flavors, but the picture that the flavors suggest. I have a sample of the discontinued Slumberhouse Baque (also 2012), which has a similar profile to Sova. The similarity of aromas is there, but Sova suggests baked goods while Baque suggests booze.

Lobb riffs on an approach that Christopher Sheldrake honed to precision in woody Serge Lutens perfumes like Arabie, Chergui and Five O'Clock au Gingembre. Framing woods with resins and spices brings out roasted tones. Sova is far less sweet than these Lutens though, as if Lobb paraphrased the Godfather cannoli meme: Leave the syrup. Take the woods.

Sova reminds me of the most delicious part of gingerbread, the scorched edges where sweetness gives way to smokiness. Lutens might have built a gingerbread house. Slumberhouse burns it down.

Hay, dark beer, pipe tobacco, mashed apples, raisins, dry herbs and honey. Sova is dense and wound tight to start, but slowly unwinds to highlight each of the above facets. Longevity it terrific, but projection is limited, as is frequently the case with extrait+ scents. Just a couple of schmears at the nape of the neck is enough to keep you in the Sova cloud all day.

Sova is Autumn in a bottle, and is made to be worn outdoors in cool weather--at a football game, transplanting perennials and planting bulbs, walking your One, or your dogs. Great stuff. Niche classic.

This is Christmas at a Billionaire's house. Rich, smoked raisins dries down to a comforting smokey, woody fruitcake and cocoa. Others from this house are similar and more wearable. Nice but expensive. 3 out of 5.

Dense, as in the aged fruitcake you open in July. Boozy, heavy, dessicated fruit, flour, rum. Soaked in honey. Thick notes so packed together there is no air or space. And more notes per sniff than you may have fragrance molecule receptors. It's a little Serge Lutens, only more so.
It's amazing... but I just don't care for the desiccated fruit notes, as I don't in some Lutens. I've never been a fan of fruit cake, wherever I find it. The dry down, where it relaxes and spreads out a little is my favorite part.

In my opinion the SOVA is of equivalent quality level to Tobacco Vanille and Ambre Narguile. Intriguingly this perfume and very pleasant feeling, is Gourman and brings a sense of very natural things, as the field, caramel, honey, and only woody nuances. Masterpiece

A sensational opening with the aroma of dried hay, hops and tonka sweetness combining to a wonder of creative perfumery - a sunny country day - with a touch of wood in the drydown. In the base a waxy note arises, mixed with castoreum with wood and amber in the background. A well-structured composition, supremely blended, well-balancing creaminess and elegance with nigh O'Driu-esque density. Very good silage, great projection and outrageously amazing longevity of over fourteen hours. A Slumberhouse masterpiece.

Oh my word, this is beautiful. Well, let me qualify that a bit – none of the Slumberhouse perfumes are conventionally attractive. But this one at least tempers the ugly/weird elements with the breathtakingly beautiful. This is the fourth Slumberhouse I've tested, but the first to really catch at my heart strings. I am still not sure that it is entirely wearable. But I sure would like a vial of this to sniff every now and then, just to remind myself that there are perfumers out there doing wild and crazy stuff in the name of art.

What I like about Sova is that Josh Lobb seems to have set out to capture the entirety of a farm during baling season, complete with the not-so-picturesque parts. As anyone who has grown up doing farm work will know, there are a host of smells involved, and not all of them pleasant. I have baled hay – back-breaking work, by the way, with or without a machine. I have mucked out horse stables. I have even stuck my hands deep within the nether regions of sheep to pull a lamb out. Nowhere are you more intensely aware of the circle of life than on a farm.

The opening, which I have come to understand as typical for a Slumberhouse, is deeply tarry, black, and sticky. But upfront, I get a load of hay absolute mixed in with the tar, so there is an immediate sense of sunshine piercing through the upper notes. It smells simultaneously of freshly-poured asphalt, hay, trampled grass, rubber tires, something green and resiny, waxy and honeyed.

The hot asphalt smell reminds me of nothing so much as those pools of poured tar on holes in the road that would always soften and almost liquefy somewhat in the heat of summer – I hope someone out there understands what I mean by that. In Ireland, growing up, there was maybe one day in the year that was ever hot enough to make the road tar all gooey like that, but that would be the smell that defined the whole summer for me, somehow – kind of like a child only ever remembers summers being sunny when he or she was a child. It also recalls the smell of heated tires and running tractors, farm implements lying around on a hot day – quasi-industrial smells mingling with the sweet smell of hay that has been cut and is now drying out in the fields. Also, I am picking up on a sweet, grassy note that is fresher than the hay note – I presume this is the clover.

Reversing what I've experienced thus far with Slumberhouse perfumes, Sova does not grow drier and more sparse, but indeed, darker, more syrupy, and somehow more “stewed” in texture. It is a very wet hay type of smell, which to my nose, is incredibly pleasing and sensual. The smell is almost like the gingerbread, dry, fruity, wet-dry smell of tobacco leaves laid out to dry in the sunshine. It also picks up a dried fruits feel, not a million miles away from the intense fruitcake feel of a Serge Lutens, specifically something like Arabie.

As the scent progresses, the petroleum and tar notes, the heated asphalt and running farm vehicles smell –all shift to the back and let the stewed hay and dried fruits accord take center stage. Towards the last stages of Sova, I sense the tar notes get drier, until they manifest more as a smoke note, adding to the fierce pleasure I get from smelling this. Something about hay and grass notes bring me straight back to summer days, to my youth, to the simple pleasures of hard physical work, and the rewards of sensory delights of rolling around in cut hay (with or without someone else – it's a pleasure in and of itself).

I really love Sova. I wish I could find it somewhere to buy. Something tells me that this would be horrendously expensive to buy, though, even if I were to find it somewhere. So, I guess I will be content to keep this little vial and take it out for a little sniff every now and then. Sova is a wild ride, alright, a bit more intense and crazy than the other Slumberhouse scents I have tried thus far, but it manages to press all of my pleasure and memory buttons at once.

Heavy, syrupy. Molasses. Lots of hay absolute is in this -- and that is a complex aroma. Fermented tobacco. Animalic, fecal or leather notes. Brown and oozing. It's pleasant because I like the smell of hay in the sun, but it's difficult because hay absolute is denser and sweeter than hay in real life -- drying in the air. This is moist, raisin-like, concentrated scent. I give it points for boldness, creative kudos for working with hay absolute, one of the most distinctive aromas in the world.

Powerful opening in a perfect Slumberhouse style, close to Jeke and Baque this time: oily, gloomy, with a stunning deep tobacco note, licorice, dark pine resins, amber (perhaps rounded by that carnal, sticky, ghastly synthetic amber – the trisamber – Lobb himself admittedly loves), cloves, a subtle vein of balsamic aniseed, an azure nuance in a black, terpenic, warm sea. I also detect patchouli and cocoa beans, which make Sova come closer for a while to Ore, although in a quite different way, more dark and strong. Finally I also smell dark woods (like birch) but also some sweet sandalwood-like note. As for other scents by Lobb, here as well it emerges a similarity to Lutens, especially for the use of benzoin, woods and resins, in a way that if the latter is more "classic", luminous and light, Slumberhouse smells like his the naughty, melancholic, slightly lunatic nephew, creating scents stuffed with Lobb's obsessive imagination and thick dense notes. Sophisticatedly gloomy, austere, contemporary, smoky, but also totally wearable and elegant. After a while it emerges better a note of hay, humid and realistic, smartly conceived behind castoreum and resins, and a honey note, dry and spicy. Nothing more to say, all is great: materials, evolution, composition. Superb!

9/10

A dark, sultry, intoxicating song. If you've ever made fruitcake or Christmas Pudding (I did from scratch one year), do you remember how month after month the fruits and nuts transformed as you kept sprinkling them with brandy? After a while, it was just one amazing, can't-be-bought, knockout smell? Well, Sova isn't exactly that, but it has the same effect. I don't see it on their website. Lucky scent says it has: sweet clover, beeswax, poplar, genet flower, golden grains, hops, hay, tobacco. Also tones of honey, pumpkin and milk. Somebody at this place has one magnificent nose.

I was a little apprehensive about Sova because the comments seemed to be split between "hay, booze, tobacco, animal" (good) and "curry" (I like to eat it but not so much to smell like it). The very high praise for Sova outweighed my apprehensions and I blind-bought it. I am glad I did. My first wearing of Sova was an Aha! moment, something I don't get often these days with perfume. I was immediately amazed by the depth, complexity and uniqueness of this scent. It didn't even really seem to be a perfume in the sense that I am used to experiencing perfume. It seemed to be alive. Sorry for the purple prose, but that's really how I felt.

I found that "hay, booze, tobacco, animal" is a pretty good description of the parts, but the sum of the parts is more than that.

One interesting thing about it is that it smells much lighter, sweeter and airier from a slight distance, but if I put my nose into my shirt, I get all the dirt and mouse dung that other reviewers have mentioned.

Extraordinary.

Melting burning plastic.It starts off smelling like burning plastic, it gets slightly better as it settles down but never even reaches mediocre. To bad it lasts forever, if you happen to spray it in your house you have to move to get away from the smell.

Milky Incense Sexy SkinMilky resins ,hay ,beewax and incense that starts with the smell of hops . Unique ! it's very sniffable .The color of dark yellow comes to my mind with the scent - very much the color of the liquid in the picture . Again there is a certain roughness ( though smoother than Jeke ) , a bold quality which is really a character of Slumberhouse. These are not airy transparent scents but strong and gripping. I get no flowers at all . This smells like sexy skin .Very good. I actually prefer this to Jeke but both are very good. Pros: Long lastingCons: None"

In a word? Outstanding.

Sova is My first experience with Slumberhouse and its really something else. Think of hay stacked in an old luxurious barn (if there ever was such a thing). Add in a pack of freshly opened cigarettes, the medicinal quality of Burt's Bees beeswax chapstick, a touch of smoky incense, gingerbread, and the nose of a high-quality bourbon. Wearing this is an experience.

The quality of Slumberhouse is immediately apparent. Be warned that this juice is concentrated and tquite powerful; one spray is more than Sufficient. The scent profile mellows out a bit over the first hour while it mixes with skin chemistry, but the power and longevity behind this frag stays. I highly recommend grabbing a sample pack from Josh to try out his current lineup and sample some unique scent profiles you just cannot find anywhere else.

For some reason, Sova reminds me of Icelandic Brennivín and Aceto Balsamico Di Modena. It doesn't actually smell like either, of course, but that's the initial impression I receive. Or perhaps Root Beer and Champagne. It has a wonderful tartness that is never abrasive, always mellowed by honey and amber. And it exudes a certain warmth, exuberance, self-assurance that is always incredibly attractive... Leaves floating in a cool breeze, grasses swaying on a hillside, tumbleweeds...