I wear Coeur de Noir when I want to feel like a pirate queen.

I once lived in an old house, built with even older wood. The blackened beams above my bed came from a naval ship–a tudor rose carved on the cross point–and the massive slab across the fireplace in one book-lined room was taken from a mast. Hundreds of years embedded in brick, absorbing woodsmoke and ash, and it still had a whiff of the open sea air.

For all the birch tar and smoke of the opening of Julie Dunkley’s Coeur de Noir it’s not the full blood and battle thunder of 1805 Tonnere;  it feels more like settling into a low chair by that hearth, and remembering, writing embroidered tales of old adventures by firelight.

For me, this is a perfume of textured things: the flakes and fragments of rolling tobacco spilling out a leather pouch soft and shiny with years of use onto hand-drawn maps and charts sheened with india ink and marked by tea rings and red wine splotches, heavy wooden library tables stacked high, rough-weave linen jackets with pockets sagged from overfilling with useful oddments and tactile treasures

Suggestible, sure, of course I am. But some scents build whole stage sets, conjure imaginary places to inhabit, other lives to ease into. And this is far more fun than the bare-shouldered evening-gowned gala-goer of other perfume fantasies.