Rubj
by Vero Profumo

I’ll hand it to Vero Kern: she keeps you on your toes with complex, novel, and adventurous compositions. She has a knack for taking familiar notes – lavender, neroli, birch tar – and making them the pillars of peculiarly disorienting accords. There’s also much, much more going on in her perfumes than those three-note pyramids at Lucky Scent let on! I have a hard time knowing what to make of Rubj’s opening gestures. Pepper? Fruit syrup? Moroccan preserved lemons? White flowers? It’s all too much, too incongruous, and moving much too rapidly for me to sort out without an olfactory freeze-frame option.

Indolic orange blossom and jasmine eventually emerge as the recognizable focus of Rubj’s structure, supported by a very potent vegetal/animalic (ambrette seed?) musk and rendered profoundly strange and compelling by a persistent illusion of those uniquely salty-sour Moroccan lemons. What started as an intensely sweet scent becomes at once bittersweet and tantalizingly tart with age. (Not unlike some people I know.)

Like both of the other Vero Kern scents, Rubj is potent (parfum strength), with bold projection and ample sillage. It also lasts and lasts…and lasts. When it finally begins to dry down, Rubj settles into an amber and musk skin scent that radiates resinous-animalic warmth for several hours longer. A fascinating scent with a unique profile, and well worth sampling, even if you don't intend to purchase.

created by of the most remarkable indie perfumers in the world.