Sticky Fingers
Francesca Bianchi (2020)

This perfume is lewd. That title. That image on the bottle label. The smell of dirty and sweaty skin, and sweet liqueur-soaked breath. Good lord. You get an impression immediately from the opening that you are in for a ride, where fresh cinnamon and coriander greet you with an alcoholic pang like a spiced liqueur. Though, I wonder, if this might be a mistake; it's not exactly alcohol so much as it seems to be perfume alcohols off-gassing a bit too quickly. It's quite hot, wet, sticky, and spicy - the liqueur-soaked breath of a tantalizing someone in your ear.

As these notes dispense - guess what, we get Bianchi's standard heart concoction of orris butter, musks, castoreum, sweet labdanum and balsams as with so many of her perfumes. The brand even mostly admit to this: "Don't get fooled by iris, no romance is going on here..." In other words, the orris butter was shoved in for a reason, but for a reason meant to convey something to you that you might not immediately pick up on. I think it's meant to convey the message that Bianchi spent a fortune on the orris butter absolute and is now trying to use it/pay for it everywhere and whichever way she can, even if it doesn't quite creatively work for the perfume. As in all of her perfumes that I've tried so far - nearly all of them - they have a kitchen-sink approach where the materials and their accords are undefined and piled on top of each other.

What saves this morass from being "more of the same" is that the castoreum is amplified by quite a margin compared to her other perfumes, and there are massive doses of a cured-tobacco presenting patchouli. "Rock-chic patchouli" according to the brand, which I do get from the perfume. There is definitely something 70s rock-n-roll, filthy tour bus, spilt alcohol and passed-out groupies in a morning-after scene of debauchery, but, weirdly, Sticky Fingers blurs the line between 70s garish hedonism and gourmand. The sweetness, certain aspects of the patchouli, and the tonka in conjunction with the buttery texture are very gourmand. Gourmand is not something the brief suggests in the slightest, but it is certainly more of a PG-rated interpretation of the title and bottle label image. Did someone on the tour bus have a food fetish? The perfume undulates back and forth over this line, which is a very welcome thing at this point in my discovery of the FB brand. The overdoses of patchouli and castoreum finally create some definition and individualistic characters to this FB perfume that have been largely absent in many of them. Bianchi's perfumes can have a tendency to be a bit of a mess, but this is a sticky, sweet, raunchy, 70s-rock n roll-era mess that you're happy to be in the middle of.

A competent chocolate-patchouli with a hefty dose of iris-y powder. It is incredibly tempting to begin listing off the long list of other chocolate-patchoulis that do this the same or better… But that’s also not entirely fair, as this does smell good.

A slight thumbs up from this jaded palate. No surprises; no disappointments. It’s chocolate. It’s patchouli. Have at it.

Sticky Fingers is not going to ruffle any feathers. It is a cosy, feel-good diorama of Francesca Bianchi’s back catalogue with most of the hard edges sanded down and its already duvet-thick volume fluffed up by a mille-feuille of chocolatey patchouli, resins, amber, tonka bean, and vanilla.

My own sticky fingers hover over the ‘buy’ button on Sticky Fingers mostly for the last two thirds of its life, which is when it turns into that combination of smells perfume lovers know as ‘sweater mélange’ – that sweet, lived-in aroma of a fabric like wool or coat collar or seatbelt exhaling, like a sigh, the breath of multiple perfumes last worn God knows when. Or that lovely and as-individual-as-a-fingerprint nuclear cloud that rushes up at you when you open a box of your favorite perfumes or cosmetics.

To wit, Sticky Fingers smells like the heady, third-day fug imprinted on my bathrobe after several days of wearing some of Francesca Bianchi’s other perfumes; especially The Dark Side with its honeyed resins, The Lover’s Tale with its sharp leather, and Lost in Heaven for its simultaneously urinous and sherbety civet-iris accord that is practically the Bianchi DNA. Yet Sticky Fingers is much softer and gauzier than any of these. It’s like all of these perfumes mingling together and blown in at you through an air vent from another room.

Digging down into the detail, there are muffled echoes of something of the choco-wheat-cereal notes from indie perfumes of the last few years (like Ummagumma by Bruno Fazzolari, Café Cacao by En Voyage, or Amber Chocolate by Abdes Salaam Attar), but also a spicy tobacco gingerbread (Tan d’Epices), and a thick ‘white’ note like sandalwood creamed with benzoin (Santal Blush perhaps). I sprayed some Ta’if (Ormonde Jayne) over the tail end of Sticky Fingers once and could have sworn to the presence of smoky, caramelized marshmallow (Amber Absolute by Tom Ford). To be clear, Sticky Fingers doesn’t smell like any one of these perfumes. It’s just a delicious, jumbled up funk of rich woody or resinous orientals that have been worn at some point in the past two or three weeks, and have left an indelible, if undefined, impression.

In essence, Sticky Fingers is a patchouli perfume. But through a glass darkly. Think of the patchouli as the soloist leading the charge in a huge orchestra, drawing in supporting riffs from the strings and the bass until the music swells up from a hundred different sources, creating an incredibly rich, harmonious sound that fills all the air pockets in the room. The patchouli starts out solo, a musty, stale, and fruity rendition of pure earth. But almost immediately it calls in the high notes of the string section, in the form of those acidulated orris-leather tones of the Bianchi DNA, and to counter that, the bass tones of grainy tobacco leaf, shredded into tiny pieces and soaked in a glass of cold, floral-anisic Chinese tea. This combination of notes and ‘sounds’ has the effect of roughing up the patchouli, turning it into a hessian cloth accord of earth, stewed tea, and tobacco, back-lit by the yellow streak of ureic civet-iris that runs through Bianchi’s work like battery acid.

This opening act is attention-catching but, focused on two or three accords that ride bullishly over everything else, it feels like we are all waiting this part out until the quieter, richer sound of the rest of the orchestra can spot an opening and rise to fill it. Eventually this happens, a whole chorus of dusty spices and sandblasted resins and micas ‘blooming’ in unison, softening the sharp edges of the Bianchi iris and blurring the outline of the patchouli. If I like the scent thus far, then I start to love it now, just as the central accord thickens up like a custard with the addition of tonka, sandalwood, vanilla, and tons of sparkly resin. This is when the perfume becomes a comforting ‘sweater mélange’.

a dirty powdery patch, not worth its price!

The cardamom and cinnamon spice opening is a playful introduction to a pure patchouli heart of Francesca Bianchi's latest patchouli assemblage. Spice is a nice set up for an otherwise clean true patchouli fragrance. To further compromise the patchouli there is a pillowy soft gentle sweetness from heliotrope and tonka which gives a soft cashmere sweater landing for the patchouli to lean into.

The name of the perfume, Sticky Fingers, references an album by the Rolling Stones and the graphics from the album cover is also mimicked in the promotion. Clever theft of imagery, but it doesn't work for me. The fragrance is a bit feminine and very soft as opposed to the hard raw sexuality in the Rolling Stones example. Sticky Fingers, the perfume, reminds me of the gentleness in Thierry Mugler A *Men but I like SF more. No matter if the name isn't totally spot on, I still like this fragrance very much. Rating: 4 of 5 stars.