Scent No. 19 - Warm Carrot
Cognoscenti (2012)

Warm Carrot is a very stable warmed smiling skin fragrance made of multi faceted pleasant to smell ingredients. This scent is a mood upflifter but is slow and steady in action. The amber accord here is a base uplifted with Ylang Ylang which can and does also have some slight narcotic indolic muskiness. Benzoin and vanilla also add sunshine the mix. Vetiver keeps it grounded and carrot seed oil gives it a slight rooty personality, a nod to the garden, that is far less of an influence than the name implies - very slight. I doubt I would pick out the carrot oil ingredient if it were not posted in the fragrance name. The overall result is the impression of sun smacked, ozone warmed bare skin which has been working earnestly and with good intentions about the garden. That smell - it is nice!

Now that I've tried all three, I've got to say that Cognoscenti is one of the more interesting new lines I've smelled in a while. All of their scents are unique, different from other scents I've tried. There's an ambitious rawness to them, an unpolished indie experimentalism that keeps them from feeling like anything from the established French mainstream, yet they also avoid smelling like the overplayed niche cliches and natural perfume disasters that plague indie perfumes.

Warm Carrot isn't what I was expecting. There's no pleasant creamy iris here - instead, that carrot seed note is drenched in what smells to me like an overdose of galbanum or opoponax, with its almost mentholated topnotes. This makes the carrot smell warm, but not in a "comfortable" way, but a "cooked" way, like soft boiled carrots surrounded by sweet sticky resin tears. Given time, the resins came out in full force, creating a rich sweet green bed of incense, while the carrot morphed into an especially piquant bell pepper smell with bright hints of vetiver.

In a way, Warm Carrot reminds me of a natural perfume, in that a lot of them have a signature resinous buzz that surrounds them at all times. But the interesting vegetal notes are pure "niche" and Warm Carrot never smells as cluttered as many natural perfumes. In combination, this never really smells edible or gourmand, despite having "food" notes, because of the resinous greens.