Olympic Orchids Night Flyer The Original was formerly known as Zoologist Bat (2015). This is the original Night Flyer Parfum recreated in 2020 and it is Cafleurebon's first pick of 2021 for their Modern Masterpieces. They call it a perfect rendering of a cave scentscape and yet astonishingly manages to keep the result totally wearable. It is a stunning game changer that truly legitimizes geosmin in perfumery.
In information from Olympic Orchids' website: Humans think of bats as elusive, mysterious, almost supernatural creatures. To experience the life of one of these night flyers, take a trip to the Cockpit Country of Jamaica, a crater-filled lunar landscape covered with lush jungle. The entrance to a cave in the hillside is shrouded day and night by a swirling fog, created when the warm air of the outside world meets the cold breath of the dark chambers beneath, with its scent of deep-reaching tree roots, moist earth, and dripping limestone walls. At dusk the bat wakes and flies on delicate, leathery wings through the stony labyrinth seeking the balmy air outside. It drinks from a stream, feasts on the wild jungle figs that grow on the hillside, and enjoys the ripe bananas and other soft fruit that grow in the cultivated clearings near the village. Fully satisfied, it makes its way back to its roost where it snuggles with its warm companions, grooms itself meticulously, and falls asleep again, lulled by the clean, sweet scent of musky fur. With notes of sandalwood, olibanum wood, vetiver, furry musk accord, wet earth, damp air, mineral notes, resins, leather, figs, banana, soft tropical fruits.
Review of Olympic Orchid Night Flyer The Original
From cafleurebon: As a professor at the University of Washington, Dr. Ellen Covey spent many years studying bats and understood this well; she was perhaps not the first to use geosmin, but surely was the first to use it together with a few other materials to enhance its effect and put it front and center as an obvious note in a perfume like never before. Perfectly rendering the cave scentscape and yet astonishingly managing to keep the result totally wearable, Olympic Orchids Perfumes Night Flyer is the stunning game changer that truly legitimized geosmin in perfumery. The former Zoologist Bat, conceived and formulated by Dr. Ellen Covey, won the Independent Category of the 2016 Art and Olfaction Awards as a groundbreaking, masterful fragrance; it also redefined the boundaries of animalic, thus deserving so in all respects to be considered a Modern Masterpiece. Dr. Covey describes how she came up with a way to tame the extreme earthiness of the cave accord with a cheerful fruity aspect “The pairing of cave smells with a fruity accord was a natural juxtaposition given that fruit bats live in caves. Some species of bats actually have a body odor that is musky-fruity, a little like Night Flyer”. It took her about a year to shape the fragrance according to her vision, fine tuning it to make the musty, mineral gloom of geosmin, patchouli and myrrh wearable with what to my nose is a genius fruity accord. At first you simply smell it as unripe bananas, but it’s just a glimpse of how multifaceted the whole composition is. On the skin, Night Flyer unfolds the whole jungle of the Cockpit Country of Jamaica, with the lush greenery of banana leaves highlighted by the minty, sulphurous juiciness of blackcurrant, which bridges so nicely with geosmin adding depth. The opaque sweetness of ripe fruits is poured over the rough earth to smooth the edges, wrapping them In the banana-like, unctuous floralcy of ylang-ylang and pulpy figs backed by a generous amount of soft musks that lend their raspberry tinged puff. The drydown of Night Flyer is calmer. While it still bears mineral echoes from the cave, it’s brightened by an original tonka bean-sprinkled leather, as supple as the skin on the little mammals’ wings. Subtle strokes of vetiver enhance the moist bitterness of the surrounding vegetation, evoking ancient- deep-reaching tree roots plunging in the damp soil for an adventurous, unique scent trail.