Anna's blends are natural only blends so they wear close to skin, quiet but excitingly complex upon a closer sniff. Venetian Red EDP is another exciting smellscape: antique Venice, with all its magical beauty to the eye and reality to the nose. In Venetian Red you have smells of damp plaster, old bricks, slow green water in the canals and swift azure tides of the lagoon. You have ancient attics full of sea air and treasure chests forgotten there since the times of Marco Polo, and you also have dust which is part glory of the Venetian republic, part decomposed brocade and maps of the world circa 15th century.
With notes of neroli absolute, seaweed absolute, nutmeg absolute, saffron absolute, labdanum absolute, oakmoss absolute, vanilla absolute, myrrh essential oil, ambergris tincture, fleur d'orange absolute, cumin CO2, patchouli essential oil, rose turkish otto, jasmine grandiflorum absolute and angelica root absolute. Venetian Red is an eau de parfum, edp.
Anna Zworykina Venetian Red Reviews
Fragrantica: My favorite perfume is Mitsouko, but she can be such a cold bitch sometimes. If you ever wished that she had a warmer, more welcoming sister, Venetian Red is for you. I have never encountered such complexity in an all natural perfume. Warm, spicy, ambery and complex, this is from Zworykina's gothic collection. Both my partner and a friend dislike Mitsouko and love this, so give it a try even if you don't like Mits. Edit: Wow, colder temperature really brings out the seaweed (I think). Strong iodine and salt opening that fades as the same gorgeous spicy drydown grows stronger. Edit: Mitsouko is no longer my favorite perfume. Since discovering Zworykina last year, I have bare worn it. Instead, all the ones I reach for first are hers. Hard to pick a new favorite among these masterpieces.
Fragrantica: Seaweed jasmine. Inspired by the city of Venice, it opens with a strong note of moist seaweed. This note accentuated by the vegetal, bitter green angelica (think Malle's French Lover) together with the salty ambergris gives it a clear dark marine character. My girlfriend said that this phase reminds her of the smell of a pile of wet grass in a composter. Which is fair enough. Then it gets dustier and mossier thanks to labdanum and oakmoss and the jasmine comes out, dominating the scent after the initial strong seaweed opening. Its dirty qualities provide, together with ambergris, an interesting animalic counterpoint. All of that is served on a woodsy-smoky background giving reasonable depth to it. Excellent.
Luca Turin: I have never been fond of all-natural perfumery, for two reasons: 1- Constraints in art are fruitful only if they channel creativity to give results pleasing to the senses, e.g. rhyme, modal harmony etc. The all-natural constraint is not productive: no all-natural perfume has ever been as good as the best natural-aromachemical ones*. 2- My definition of Nature includes Organic Chemistry and all who sail in her. This said, I find Anna Zworykina‘ fragrances very impressive indeed, and largely immune from the mushiness of most natural perfumery. Wisely, she seems to stick to classical forms and puts her skill into making them work optimally. Verdigris, for example, is a resplendent, stonking chypre. You can clearly smell the superb bergamot, cistus and oakmoss singing in harmony. Young Cossack (in Russia Cossacks have a more positive reputation than abroad) is a lovely animalic hay-tonka accord that would make a wonderful masculine, with or without sabre and horse. Her Cuir de Russie is the most eccentric of that name I remember smelling, very floral and less smoky than the usual fare, with a strange and beautiful sweet-green drydown. In the end, empirical evidence prevails: these are perfumes that even a fan of synthetics like me would love to wear.
