When I wear Vero Kern’s Naja, I get an overwhelming craving for that moment of opening a new packet of cigarettes, tearing off the cellophane, pulling out and crumpling the textured silver paper in one move, and breathing the just-freed scent of tobacco*. I quit smoking a few years ago–how else do you think I’d be able to fund my perfume habit?
Those rituals and those scents are at the heart of my experience of Naja. Along with the sensation of the smooth cool slither of silk on silk, with that shivery goosebump reaction when silk catches and rasps, grain against grain, like Joan Greenwood’s beautiful voice catching as she laughs.
Sure, sure: melon, linden, osmanthus-suede, tobacco, honey.
For me, a list of notes doesn’t begin to help explain one of Vero’s incredible scents that move so seamlessly between brain and body, thinking and skin.
Naja feels like ritual.
* I also get the urge to re-read Buñuel’s My Breath.
“What lovelier sight is there than that double row of white cigarettes, lined up like soldiers on parade and wrapped in silver paper? If I were blindfolded and a lighted cigarette placed between my lips, I’d refuse to smoke it. I love to touch the pack in my pocket, open it, savor the feel of the cigarette between my fingers, the paper on my lips, the taste of tobacco on my tongue. I love to watch the flame spurt up, love to watch it come closer and closer, filling me with its warmth.”
actually…go and read the whole of chapter six, It’s glorious.
first posted 7 April 2019. Footnotes and poster image added December 2025.
