Perhaps it’s not the most opportune moment to write about a scent of the world on fire, or about extinction-level events…

But remember when you were six years old, lying on the floor playing with your dinosaur toys? It wasn’t make-believe. You were in a living world of giants, the carpet replaced by lush undergrowth and alien flowers, chair legs by towering trees. The boring adult chatter faded as volcanoes smoked and rumbled, shrieking pterodactyls circled the red skies, and another harmless hadrosaur became lunch.

This is what Antonio Gardoni of bogue and Victor Wong of Zoologist perfumes have done with Tyrannosaurus Rex: pulled you deep into this vivid imaginary landscape.

T-Rex creates and inhabits a space, like a thunderstorm trapped inside a ring of mountains, or waves of music crashing against walls and reverberating in your ribs. This perfume is sound that you feel as much as hear. It has a physical presence, with the vibrations becoming tangible –almost visible– as they ripple and echo through other movements. (Shivering leaves, oily dripping nectar, surging blood, your heartbeat racing the earth-shaking steps.)

And T-Rex never stops moving. Everything is rising and falling, evaporating and condensing.

There’s a solidity, a density, and yes, a grace, like ten tonnes of muscled predator raging in a dying world. It’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor, soaring, beguiling, and destroying you with walls of noise, then soothing you with soft melody, a lullaby to ease you to extinction in the endlessly deep earth that will hold you for aeons.

(Why has it taken me a hundred posts to get to Zoologist Tyrannosaurus Rex, the one fragrance that so obviously combines my love of dinosaurs and perfume?

The slight awkwardness of only having a decant to put in the photograph. That’s all. Oh, how I wish the travel sprays were available in the UK. I love it, but 60ml would be a lot of T-Rex.)

originally posted 24 August 2019