Review by rogalal
Now that I've tried all three, I've got to say that Cognoscenti is one of the more interesting new lines I've smelled in a while. All of their scents are unique, different from other scents I've tried. There's an ambitious rawness to them, an unpolished indie experimentalism that keeps them from feeling like anything from the established French mainstream, yet they also avoid smelling like the overplayed niche cliches and natural perfume disasters that plague indie perfumes. Warm Carrot isn't what I was expecting. There's no pleasant creamy iris here - instead, that carrot seed note is drenched in what smells to me like an overdose of galbanum or opoponax, with its almost mentholated topnotes. This makes the carrot smell warm, but not in a "comfortable" way, but a "cooked" way, like soft boiled carrots surrounded by sweet sticky resin tears. Given time, the resins came out in full force, creating a rich sweet green bed of incense, while the carrot morphed into an especially piquant bell pepper smell with bright hints of vetiver. In a way, Warm Carrot reminds me of a natural perfume, in that a lot of them have a signature resinous buzz that surrounds them at all times. But the interesting vegetal notes are pure "niche" and Warm Carrot never smells as cluttered as many natural perfumes. In combination, this never really smells edible or gourmand, despite having "food" notes, because of the resinous greens.
