At first, all I could smell in the vial or on my skin was grass. A shrill grass note, very accurate, interesting but too piquant to wear much during a season of sneezing. Of course, I was pretty sure my sneezing had nothing to do with the Zombi, but the association bothered me. I've had the sample for a few weeks now, and when I opened it Saturday the grass note was no longer noticeable.
Left was a garden smell and a dirt smell, all of it sweet but none of it sharp and cloying like, for example, narcissus. It was sweet in a plausible way. It had a depth and subtlety. Others have said it's like dried roses; I would say it's like a real rose with the high notes suppressed, so all that's left is a deep plantlike warmth from the heart of the flower.
My mother noticed it in the car and said it was "very nice," and when I asked her to describe it she said, "It's like a musk." (Neither of us are great connoisseurs of perfume. My mother puts on lipstick twice a year, and a dress once every two years.) I said, "It's supposed to be like flowers and dirt." She said, "Hmmm... maybe flowers."
"But not too sweet, right?"
"No, it's very nice."
At the train station I sat, in my trench coat, beside a woman with her arms and legs exposed. I was sweating and the perfume was blossoming on my skin. She wore a different, more obvious fragrance and I wondered whether she could smell mine, and whether I should view this as a dialog or a battle. I wanted to ask her whether she could smell my perfume, but in retrospect it probably would have been fruitless because she is a slatherer whose nose must be just as dull as mine. Some whiny-voiced kid kept asking the woman dumb questions about the train schedule, and I thought, "He's paying attention to her because her limbs are naked, and it's fortunate that he can't really see me."
A good five or six hours later I wound up in a dive bar, but was relieved to find there was an excellent DJ. Dancing to Christian Death, Ween, and Lords of the New Church (And who has heard Lords of the New Church in public during the last ten years?), I was wrapped in the smell of myself and aspects of a garden. The fragrance was protecting my inward-ness and giving substance to the air around me. I eventually asked the dude I'd come with what he thought of my perfume. He said, "I can smell it from here. It blends with your natural scent. I wasn't sure you were wearing perfume at all."
"What's it like?"
"Kind of sweet. Hard to say; I really like it."
I had been repelling advances from this person for the better part of a year, so I tried to handle this delicately: "It's supposed to smell like dirt."
"You do NOT smell like dirt."
"I don't know; it smells kind of like dirt and flowers to me. But I guess I can't tell what it's like from a few feet away."
"No, you can't smell it because you're inside of it."
"Shit! I need to get someone else to wear my perfumes."
"It's no good; some of it is your smell."
"I will never know what any of my perfumes smell like!"
"It's no good; you will never know."
So I was left with the troubling thought that Zombi could lend itself to the corrupt use of persuasively and secretly enhancing one's natural fragrance. At the end of the night my friend told me he'd been with a girl whose sweat smelled very sweet and pleasant, but she'd always denied wearing perfume. Eventually he'd detected the same scent... on another woman!
My friend's stories about women often end with a note of traumatic disillusionment.
So, this perfume is a hit with my mother, my old pal, and presumably with other people. It's like a haircut that disappointed you, but everyone else thought was a drastic improvement over the green and black mullet. Everything I choose for myself is like a green and black mullet. By promises of grave dirt and undeath, I have been fooled into wearing a sophisticated and subtle perfume which makes me seem like a lovely young woman.
Just not sure how I feel about this.
Two other thoughts:
Zombi meets several important criteria. For one, it has a good throw. A perfume you can only smell by putting your nose to your wrist is hardly a perfume.
This is one of the few fragrances I like, so far, which could be considered diurnal. I love Sloth but feel stupid putting it on in the morning, and it has to fight the day. It's trying to create its special atmosphere of carefully researched perversion, and the brightness of noon is separating the sweetness from the spices, making it incoherent.
Not so with Zombi, which has a combined darkness and lightness, and is not in some kind of fundamental opposition to the concept of daylight.
