I was wrong about Anubis, but now I am making up for lost time. When I first tried it, I found it too dense. I knew that it was beautiful, that the notes list could have been written for me, and that Liz Moores of Papillon Artisan Perfumes is a magician, but I just couldn’t find my way in to it. It felt like walking around the outside of a locked museum: frustrating as hell, because you’ve travelled all this way to see the treasures and why did no one tell you it was bloody closed on a Tuesday? Surely there’s a custodian who could show me the secret entrance?

Turns out there was: jtd of scenthurdle*. I was looking for something else on his site, and reading from link to link to link—you should do this, his writing is superb—and found his review of Anubis. And it all fell into place.

So I found my second sample, and wore a little on still-warm post-gym skin, and it just *bloomed*. A door opened, and let the light in. It’s still dark in all the high and far corners, but something glows like the gilding on medieval altarpieces in candlelight.

Or, going back to the locked museum, it feels like the time a curator walked us quietly around a cold dark room in the National Museum in Damascus, revealing the third century wall paintings from the synagogue of Dura Europos. In the small pools of light from his torch, faces and fires and stories were vivid and alive, bright with reds and gold protected for almost two millenia by being buried in sand.

Anubis is smoky, leathery, saffron-rich, resinous incense, with patterns and twists in the rising skeins of smoke that you can get lost in, and ghosts of flowers, like ones you can remember rather than see. And a sense of being in a very old, very sacred space.

Hello new bottle. I am going to enjoy you.

* jtd (Conor) died in 2021, a great loss to those who loved him, and to everyone who loved his writing. You can still read his site scenthurdle via the Internet Archive or explore his reviews on Basenotes. He was one of the very best.

originally posted 4 April 2019, but with a differet photo