M/Mink by Byredo, 2010

M/Mink smells like the "good twin" to a lot of awful masculine fragrances with notes like honey, iodine and ozone turning into urinal and men's locker room: male body fluids with added cleaning fluids. M/Mink features a honey note that's almost, but not quite sickening: more murky wood than urine. I tend to categorically dislike fragrances with honey in them, but this I find wearable and interesting. There's also a touch of salt which reminds me more of sea breezes than body fluids, though there's an intriguing hint of naughtiness about it. M/Mink smells old, murky and musty like the perfume clinging to a vintage fur, but it also smells very outdoorsy, wild and free: woody and animalic. I'm surprised that previous reviewers call it chemical and artificial because to my nose it's very natural-smelling, organic, feral, warm. It does have the intense "pow!" of synthetic smell molecules though. It's a "brown" scent for sure, thick and dense and reminiscent of burnished woods or the glint of light in guard hairs. Actually, it reminds me a lot of Neil Bartlett's wonderful novel "Skin Lane". I'm also a bit surprised that previous reviewers categorise it as masculine. I completely disregard gender designations on scent, but to my nose M/Mink is traditionally feminine, like an old-world perfume. I guess it's the combination of sweetness, warmth and dirtiness that does it - masculine fragrances tend so often to have something nauseatingly fresh, cool, clean, antiseptic about them, like deodorants, even when they feature notes like woods and musk. M/Mink is the antithesis to that. Perhaps it tends to disagree with male skin chemistry?

I like this one. M/Mink is certainly very unusual and it has a cool, detached, and uncompromising ambience about it that I totally appreciate. It's a masculine, I think, and I can't really imagine it working very well on a woman, although I guess there are always those who could pull it off. It smells like a very interesting mix of something extremely mechanical and industrial - and a lot of fresh autumn air. There's a tension-filled balance to the whole thing, a kind of refined primitivity or polished rawness. I don't mean primitive in any animalic, musky, or sweaty sense: it's more graphic, like a stern monochrome with an irregular yellow dot in one corner. As the name suggests, this is indeed an inky fragrance but not the thick earthy vetiver ink of Encre Noire. It's much more detached and austere, less vibrant and bodily - a postindustrial urban landscape. A flock of black birds perched silently on a row of power lines against the grey evening sky. A cold yellow sunset. Despite its obvious strangeness, I actually don't find M/Mink any harder to wear than a lot of the Comme des Garçons fragrances: it falls pretty much into the same category as the Synthetics and Odeurs, I think - if you can wear those comfortably, M/Mink should be no problem. I keep it in regular rotation, and I wear it whereever I want.