Varanasi
Meo Fusciuni (2020)

The way Giuseppe conveys personal experiences from his travels, and emotions likewise, through his works, is quite admirable. With Varanasi, he not only communicates his memories of the Spiritual Capital of India, but does it justice to such an extent that one can feel the energy of the city by experiencing the fragrance. He also portrays a lesser “advertised” face of India. It is not as pretty and colorful as you might encounter with most olfactory compositions or see in postcards and travel magazines. He shows the wild parts, the unfiltered bits that are purposefully omitted.

By now, you can contour an idea of what this fragrance smells like. Spiritual, spicy, dirty in a visceral and natural way (that developed countries forgot about). He offers glimpses of the agreeable: a shy jasmine and rose duet, some warm, sweet cardamom, enough to remind you of the beautiful parts. But make no mistake, this perfume is ultimately dark, sober, and quite dirty. Another fascinating thing is how the incense accord feels. It’s a “wet incense.” I can’t shake that damp quality off. Imagine Varanasi at night during the religious ritual of Asthi Visarjan. This is when people come to immerse the ashes of their deceased into the Ganges. How would that smell? He conveys that imagery through this scent. Indeed, the perfume is very earthy. Damp earth. I get plenty of the spikenard, but also the cypriol and the oakmoss. There is a slight minerality from the ambergris. The saffron and the musks help create a leather-like accord. It is both smooth and subhuman. The spices hit hard in the opening, mostly nutmeg and cardamom, and stick throughout. Above everything, the incense reigns supreme. It feels more like wood being burnt for incense rather than resins. The effect is quite dry and devoid of sweetness, slightly ashy. The damp quality sticks all along, making it stand out among other incense-themed perfumes. Truthfully, I find Varanasi rather unique. If I were to draw a parallel, I could name Tom Ford’s London. However, while London is bone dry and akin to the capital at night during Victorian England, Meo’s creation travels many miles to the East to tackle a more profound and religious approach to that same spicy-dirty-incense theme.

IG:@memory.of.scents

When I sprayed this, I imagined SNL's Father Guido Sarducci saying "Vara nasi" ("very nasty")... For me, it is similar to Bogue MAAI, but where I love the opening of that perfume (even if I have trouble tolerating it subsequently), this one is just a massive challenge, on the order of Areej Le Doré scents. To be worn by total he-men, who can dazzle over the alley cat scent, and even then it might best be sprayed lightly...

I've been enchanted with the description of this fragrance and a basenotes user was kind enough to send me a sprayed strip of it, so I "blindbought" it.

Varanasi is quite hard to pin down because how much it changes on my skin and with the weather. It starts with a blast of Oud and very animalic leather and then the very grey ambergris shows up. Some days I get a lot of the animalic/woody, others it's almost like a garden of lovely florals and the green side with a very tame animalic side and others I get almost a bazaar of spices with the ever present oud backbone. It's almost as if the fragrance is the city itself and you discover new areas of it with every wear.

Performance is unreal, I clocked over 15 hours on a warm weather (~25 C) with very good projection/sillage!

An absolute joy in my collection and I can't recommend this enough for those who love bold scents and want to be mesmerized with each wear!

Varanasi Meo Fusciuni
It's safe to say that Varanasi is Meo Fusciuini's oud – and what an oud it is. Ushered in on a singing shop-fresh leather note, it is effulgent and diffusive, unrolling a vista of aged woody tones, touched here by an earthy bitterness, there by a hint of distant flowers (a passerby with a string of jasmine and rosebuds in their hair), accents of soapy cardamom turning into warm clove and incense, the entire shifting sense of scent impressions seemingly on a journey.
Having grown up in India, I'm skeptical of the wide-eyed tourist's impression of the country's holy sites, where the search for the spiritual is forced to rub shoulders with brash god-related commerce. But Imprezzabile acknowledges Varanasi (the city after which this perfume is named) as a juxtaposition of the ‘sacred and the profane', calling it a non-place, and there is that sense of great amalgamation and outward flow to this offering. Varanasi is famously the place where religious Hindus would choose to die, with multiple cremations carried out on the banks of the river Ganges every day, the ashes and flowers scattered upon its waters, which are pure in the minds of the devout, polluted by any scientific measure. Imprezzabile's conception of water, so central to Varanasi's identity, is of it ‘flowing in the bowels of the earth, touching the roots of everything' – and this sense of fragrant water filtered through dark, unknown, buried things comes through in this perfume.
Beautiful. The only thing that slightly detracts from this perfume, in my opinion, is its resemblance to Nishane's Musiqa Oud in the late stages, after about a couple of hours have passed and the stream of impressions slows down and settles.