House  Eris Parfums
Released  2017
Perfumer  Antoine Lie
Fragrance Family  Leather
Notes  black pepper, saffron, olibanum, Indian ginger, Virginia cedar, Australian sandalwood, castoreum, birch tar, Indonesian patchouli, Haitian vetiver, cacao, Laotian benzoin

Description  The result of a collaboration between Barbara Herman (the prolific fragrance blogger behind Yesterday's Perfume and author of Scent & Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume) and Antoine Lie (the avant-garde perfumer well-known for his work with Etat Libre d'Orange), Eris Parfums, named for the Greek goddess of troublemaking and disruption, is a collection of fragrances inspired by the bold eroticism of vintage perfumes. Mx. (pronounced mix) shares a name with the gender-neutral title which provides an alternative to such titles as Mr. and the various female titles from Ms. to Mrs. Like Mx. the title, Mx. the fragrance celebrates gender fluidity and eschews the tired old dichotomy between masculine and feminine fragrances.

Woody fragrances were once the realm of men, then in 1992 Shiseido released Féminité du Bois, announcing to the world that women could wear woody fragrances too. Now, Mx. takes the next logical step, proclaiming that woody fragrances, like all fragrances, belong to everyone.

It should come as no surprise that Mx. smells like the platonic ideal of a woody fragrance. It straddles the line between extremes and, in doing so, achieves a perfect balance between sweet and dry, warm and cool, and spicy and clean. The star of the composition is a combination of Australian sandalwood and Virginia cedar—a warm, dry and eminently woody accord that recalls such sandalwood masterpieces as Diptyque's Tam Dao or Maître Parfumeur et Gantier's Santal Noble.

50 ml eau de parfum spray
$165.00

1 ml eau de parfum sample
$5.00