Anna Zworykina

I have admired Zworykina’s work for some time. Most of her creations have been intense and atmospheric. This one is no exception, but it goes further in a direction I usually find tiresome, yet succeeds brilliantly.

To make my customary musical analogy, there is a type of perfume, usually made of natural materials, that approximates a musical genre popular at the turn of the 20th century, the one-movement Symphonic Poem. That particular musical beast has no big-slow-fast movements, though it may have different sections within. It is usually of the swirling variety, with waves of often relatively shapeless music intended to show off skill in orchestration. In its heyday, it answered a hankering for musical plenitude and abstraction, but has gone out of style. At its worst, it is either formless noodling or schlock. At its best—for example, Albéric Magnard’s Hymne à Vénus—it achieves an odd mixture of menace and peace.
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Ostara Winds is as close to a Symphonic Poem as any perfume I’ve ever smelled. For the first twenty minutes, the fragrance washes back and forth among a bucolic smell of hay, a bitter green smell of grass, and an oddly fresh, almost camphoraceous note in the background. I was tempted to dismiss it as what French perfumers call une soupe, meaning something overly complex and undifferentiated. But I am glad I stuck with it, because in time, a distinct figure of a beautiful classical green chypre emerges. I showed it to Tania at that point, and her reaction was, “A familiar face!”

It has been my absolute pleasure to have spent many months with the perfumes of Anna Zworykina, and I wish I could review all of them as each one is worthy of a dedicated review. Alas, favorites must be chosen, and Black Gardenia rose to the top rather quickly with its heady mix of white flowers and leather. A lot of leather, and a lot of smoke as well. Anna writes about Billie Holiday and jazz as her inspiration for this perfume, and it would fit right in at a dark smoky club with the scent of a balmy gardenia tucked behind thick sultry hair. Black Gardenia is not a fresh-from-the-garden flower, and it’s not purely gardenia either. It’s an indolic jasmine merged with powdery iris, in addition to notes of bitter crushed leaves amidst the aforementioned leathery backdrop. This is one of those shape shifting perfumes that smells intensely smoky one moment, then utterly inky or floral the next. Complex and sexy, I adore it. Jasmine and Agarwood is another tropical floral from Anna that I was drawn to, but it’s quite different from Black Gardenia. Jasmine and Agarwood is more radiant, but nevertheless intriguing. Gentle mimosa and violet leaf guide this particular perfume experience into luminous green and bright honey. The jasmine feels very dewy and even though this metaphor gets overused when describing perfumes, it really does smell like a tropical garden after a summer’s afternoon rain shower. We are in the middle of a snow storm right now, but somehow Jasmine and Agarwood is sitting well on my skin and doesn’t feel out of place, most likely because there is that hint of agarwood to keep the sweet and misty jasmine from getting too saccharine or fluffy. Ambrette and sandalwood augment this grounding effect even further, but only a touch, as the green aspect of jasmine truly shines in this beautiful fragrance.