Naja 
Vero Profumo (2017)
LIMITED EDITION

With perfumes like Onda and Rubj in the Vero Kern lineup, it’s taken me a while to come around to this strange little sister scent: powder linden? Light aquatic tobacco… an Osmanthus stripped of its funk? What have you done with our daring, unapologetic Vero???

Well, every year when my neighborhood basewood trees all burst with linden flowers, I revisit this one, hoping for it to click.

And clicked it has. This perfume manages to strip all the weight from a series of suffocating notes. Tobacco and Osmanthus particularly. It suffuses them with the air and light necessary to let them live. Every single time I wear this now, I hold the bottle to my heart and say, “yes, I understand you now and you are my favorite, don’t tell the others.”

I know this review is incredibly ridiculous. Scroll down and read ClaireV for the straight up truth.

Sinuous, slinky, pollen-laden joy. Naja is a perfume that effortlessly outshines the sum of its parts, full of change and dynamism. I love its light, diffusive quality – an impressive trick considering a fatty, true-to nature linden is the star of its opening and a chewy, almost mulched tobacco is at its heart. And yet, Naja wears like a ripple, teasing my nose with all kinds of notes – iodine tincture, fruit parings, dusky and humid vetiver, marine salt – but above all else an unforeseen and perfectly realized union of spring florals and tobacco. It has an enduring and inviting strangeness, and yet so much of what the nose perceives in it is familiar. Novel, invigorating and yet supremely stylish – what more does one require from a perfume?

Genre: You tell me (Incandescent Tobacco?)

The utterly novel accord of lime blossom (linden, tillieul), osmanthus, and tobacco Vero Kern explores in Naja launches tobacco into such an unfamiliar orbit, I don't even know how to classify the scent. It is utterly brilliant, and it is like nothing else I have smelled.

Tobacco in fine fragrance typically appears in dark leathery or oriental contexts: think Fumerie Turque, Baque, or Havana. Not here. The ineffable lightness of linden blossom and osmanthus pump Naja's tobacco full of helium and send it floating off into the clear blue sky in a manner I would not have thought possible. You may not like it, but you ought to smell it at least once, just to know that such a thing can actually be done.

I greatly admire this perfumer/house in the same way that I admire Bogue. Vero Kern's scents are always vastly original and striking, if not always entirely wearable. I think Onda in its original extrait form was one of the true greats. I wouldn't rank Naja up there with Onda, in terms of unique and vivid oddness, but it is quite a bit more approachable, and for many wearers, this will be a plus. I love its opening: the deep punch of tobacco, but am slightly less enamored of its segue into melon and osmanthus. This is merely personal taste, and if you are a lover of these two notes, you will be a fan. For me, the combination of tobacco with osmanthus is a bit too sticky and powdery-sweet, and I miss the strength and depth of the animalics that can often be found in her fragrances, and that keep me sniffing all day in anticipation.

A creamy, blond tobacco floral sluiced with the iodine-like astringency of melon rind. Naja reminds me of Le Parfum de Therese and Diorella, not in the way it smells, particularly, but because they all take dense, saturated materials and pass them through a sieve of something salty and aqueous, giving them a luminescence that is particularly French. The dense tobacco of Naja is leavened by this salty, wet fruit note, and underpinned by a bitter, doughy suede note fleshed out with the apricot skin of osmanthus flower. Pulled in two directions, sometimes it feels airy and dusty, other times, thick and chewy.

There is also a sharp spice to Naja that is immensely appealing, something hot, slightly smoky, and carnation-like, but although I can understand the references to Tabac Blond and Habanita, Naja is far stranger and more modern than either – in other words, a creature of its own time.

I sense a dusty, pollen-ish honey texture here too, unsweet and slightly floral, which I conclude is coming from the lime blossom. I don't know if the effect is deliberate or not, but it is this slightly bitter, dusty honey that links Naja to both Onda and Rozy.

To my nose, there is none of the citric brightness of lime that others seem to be picking up, just the slightly green floral tang of linden honey and that salty, wet fruit note that is too blurry to define as either a melon, an apple, or anything else specific.

What I love the most about Naja is its surprising sturdiness, its sense of substance. In each of my wearings, I visualized Naja as a dense square of osmanthus-tobacco lokhoum, striated with saltwater and dusted with an inch-deep layer of green pollen.

Like MEM, Naja is an El Bulli meal full of little trade-offs between texture and taste that will prick your saliva buds and fire up all five of your senses. And like its creator, Naja is as elegant and fierce as a single slash of Russian Red across an otherwise unmade-up face.