The Breath-Soul Enigma Unveiled in Shadows
Phronema Perfumes is a fragrance project that was initially conceived of in 2020 with the intention of forging a series of works of art to celebrate the ancient roots of the olfactive imagination. The small collection of fragrant offerings celebrate many rare, high quality and ancient ingredients sought after through tireless travel. The composition of each fragrance is pursued with absolute abandon: sculpting the room of the scent by following its lead, without care for sacrifice of the perfumer.
Sample Set
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This is a sample set of all 10 Phronema Perfumes fragrances. They are all 1ml but come in a 2ml or 3ml glass sprayer in order to supply the best possible spray experience while giving a cheaper option to sample the fragrances.
This set includes:
Måneløs Extrait
Natural History Extrait
Being-Towards-Death Extrait
Monoliths and Dimensions Extrait
Masae Aida no Tebukuro Extrait
Ground-Zero Standards Extrait
St. Seraphim's Stone Extrait
Coronation of Sesostris Extrait
Adam’s Lament Extrait
Desert Water Extrait -
45$
Natural History
Extrait de Parfum
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Taking its name from the 2014 film by master filmmaker James Benning, recalling its questions of mixing commerce and culture, as well as the paradoxical task of preserving those things we cherish from history while at the same time taking them from their original context, and hoping to delay their inevitable demise against the sands of time. Natural History takes an artisanal Bengali Oud distilled in 2003, golden ambergris, deer musk from Vietnam (carefully blended to recall the Dam ul Ghazel profile) and a beautiful Rose de Mai oil, and blends them with an eye on accentuating each of these beloved oils!
Top: Ylang, Champaca, Juniper, Rose de Mai
Mid: Oppoponax, Sweet Birch, Jasmine, Castoreum
Base: tolu balsam, tonka bean, sandalwood, vanilla, benzoin, deer musk, ambergris, bengali oud
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250$
Monoliths & Dimensions
Extrait de Parfum
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Like the low-end drone guitar experimentation of Sunn O))) which Monoliths & Dimensions takes its name, this fragrance primarily utilizes base-notes in order to create a dense, smoky amber accord to dance back and forth with a complex series of sandalwood notes that display the full range of this tremendous note's life. A radiant, rich and resinous series of notes swirl around shifting from delicious to holy, placing one the precarious position of being summoned, but the hesitation before the sacred space keeps one standing still: entranced. All this before you see the precious treasure clearly before your eyes: the tea, the honey, dark red fruits, smoke and barn of a rich Koh Kong Cambodian Oud oil from the only reported jungle left in Koh Kong with wild trees. If this wasn't enough, the Koh Kong oil is accentuated by the honeyed tobacco/musky, mentholic Vietnamese oud. The rich timbre of all of the notes preceding this precious oud shine forth with luminous prismatic detail.
Base: Amber, East Indian Mysore Sandalwood, New Caledonian Sandalwood, Australian Sandalwood, Royal Hawaiian Sandalwood, vanilla, Labdanum Absolute, Labdanum Resinoid, black sacra frankincense, patchouli, golden ambergris, vietnam agarwood, koh kong cambodian agarwood
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250$
Being-towards-Death
Extrait de Parfum
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For German giant of philosophy, Martin Heidegger, Being-towards-Death is a way of being for man rather than merely an orientation that brings him closer to his clinical death. The projective aspect of man means that at every moment of his existence, man is Being-ahead-of-itself, oriented towards the realm of possibilities. These possibilities are life 'standing outside of itself' (literally 'ecstasy' from the Greek ekstasis) and in Being-towards-Death, these are couragesly accepted with Death at the heart of life. As Heidegger said, "once a man is born, he is old enough to die.' In the Ancient Greek and Hebrew world, myrrh and aloe were mixed together as a balming method for the dead - and we see in the New Testament as Jesus's feet were annointed with a pound of myrrh by the repentant woman after breaking the neck of the perfume jar. Both of these actions, the annointing of feet with Myrrh, and the breaking of the perfume jar, are acts that are done for burial of the dead. The woman then cleaned his feet with her tears and her hair. This action is not only an extremely costly gift in terms of the amount and rarity of the oil, but also an incredibly vulnerable and intimate act of love to him who was going to set about dying for the world.
Myrrh is, for many reasons, often neglected as a perfume note. It may be the least represented precious resin in all of perfumery. In fact, when one encounters most of the 'myrrh-centric' fragrances of the world, one can often barely make the note out. In Being-towards-Death we used Myrrh from Somalia, Oman, Yemen and Ethiopia, paired with Bitter Orange, Jasmine, Styrax, Castoreum, Copahu Balm, Rhubarb, Cinnamon, Frankincense, Tonka and a Gin accord in order to accentuate the properties of each variety of Myrrh present in the overall fragrance, leading one to the cooling river of meditation in order that they may see themselves and their lives clearly before them.
Being-towards-Death :
Top: Gin, Rhubarb, Cinnamon, Orange
Mid: Jasmine, incense, Tonka
Base: Myrrh, Castoreum, Styrax, Copahu Balm
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250$
Måneløs
Extrait de Parfum
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Måneløs, Moonless in Norwegian speaks to the pitch black sky in anticipation of the Nordic Lights - a paradoxical feeling of warmth against the icy terrain. This is the feeling one gets when one smells the spleandor of raw Egyptian Jasmine Grandiflorum oil. The voluptuous, musky and heady white floral character is paired with a redolant, clean iris, accentuated by carrot seeds to give one the feeling of standing upon the cold earth of Norway before the yawning abyss of the infinite. The olfactory whites of the tuberose and jasmine, the purple/blue iris and heliotrope, the pink cyclamen and the yellow ylang ylang, champaca, and frangipani shimmer with the promise of their visual representation in the cool black of the sky above.
Måneløs:
Top: Grapefruit, Carrot Seed, Heliotrope,
Mid: Frangipani, Ylang Ylang, Cyclamen, Narcissus
Base: champaca, tuberose, jasmine, iris
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250$
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The concept of Russian Leather in perfume is based on an idea of delivering the smell of legendary nobility and otherworldly grace to whoever could obtain a bottle: the smell of a rare leather that only a particular group of Russian aristocrats was even allowed to own. Even more than the rarity of this production of leather, fragrances can do something else: they can symbolize and represent true grace and nobility of the soul. Building upon this idea in crafting a scent that ethnographically represents nobility, we look east of Russia to Japan. In Japan, the jasmine flower represents the challenging relationship of purity and love, and is seen lavishly on display at weddings. This display shows us that when logic and reasoning fail, symbolism steps in to communicate something much deeper and much more true, such as the beauty of chastity in marriage. The most common communal participation in fiction for the past hundred years has taken place via cinema - which has famously achieved this paradox by communicating "24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.” Perhaps the figure that best encapsulates this symbolism is Setsuko Hara (born Masae Aida,) who was the central actress in many films from some of the all-time greatest filmmakers, including Yasujirou Ozu, Akira Kurosawa and Mikio Naruse. She lived a quiet and hidden life, seeing to it that we will never find out who she was. While seeming to codify the separate parts she played in the fictional worlds of her films, subsuming her own life and dreams into theirs, she proved herself to be far greater than the sum of these parts. Her choice of anonymity after such fame grew into the ultimate rebuke to the culture that sought to worship her. She thus earned the dual nicknames of "the Eternal Virgin" and "the Woman Who Never Was." Her mystery and beauty are at least temporarily enshrined in some of the greatest films to ever grace the Earth, and although we know not who she is, her films twinkle with the sublimity of art in its purest sense.
In 'Masae Aida no tebukuro' we have taken the traditional approach to a Russian Leather styled fragrance - exchanging cheap synthetic ingredients for the most sublime ingredients worthy of symbolizing true nobility, and punctuated it with a rich heady jasmine grandiflorum absolute to allow us to experience truly chaste beauty. All the while, refusing to ignore Masae Aida by presenting all of this with modern flourishes of sparkling golden ambergris, rich tea-heavy Hainan Oud, buttery Indonesian sandalwood, and crisp meditative black sacra frankincense.
TOP:
aldehyde, bergamot, blackberry, black pepper, caraway, celery seed,
hazelnut, lemon, orange blossom, raspberry, star anise
MID:
ambrette, artemisia, clary sage, heliotrope, honey, immortelle, jasmine grandiflorum absolute, lavender, rose, tobacco, tuberose, violet leaf, ylang ylang
BASE:
amber, golden ambergris, birch tar, castoreum, cedar, coumarin, civet, black sacra frankincense, labdanum, leather, myrrh, oakmoss, Hainan oud, musk, patchouli, Indonesian sandalwood, vetiver -
250$
Masae Aida no Tebukuro
Extrait de Parfum
St. Seraphim’s Stone
Extrait de Parfum
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One of the great images of Orthodoxy that blossomed in the United States alongside St. Herman of New Valaam, is his great contemporary, St. Seraphim of Sarov. The solitary struggles of both men were distinguished by a life following the Holy Spirit, and one which expounded itself through the piercing knowledge of scripture and the holy fathers of the Church: having truly acquired the mind of the church. While St. Seraphim struggled in a land far different from America, he and St. Herman were brought together on American soil by those who struggled under their patronage, Fr. Seraphim Rose and Fr. Herman Podmoshensky. Fr. Seraphim Rose's writings and translation work was huge for the English speaking world, and its impact can hardly be measured. Likewise, St. Seraphim's impact upon the world can itself hardly be measured, not only in his influence upon later spiritual leaders like Fr. Seraphim, but also his dedication to the notion that if one were to "acquire a peaceful spirit" then "thousands around you will be saved." St. Seraphim was so dedicated to this ideal, that when he, for unknown reasons, noticed that the Holy Spirit had withdrawn from him, he undertook a great spiritual labor: for a thousand days and nights, he knelt on a large stone not far from his cell, calling out to God, with hands raised, praying the publican's prayer "O God, be merciful to me a sinner."
Notes: An Artisanal Cambodian Oud from 2018, Chinese Cassia, Ethiopian Myrrh, Vintage Hyssop Tincture
"How lovely are your tents, O Jacob!
Your dwellings, O Israel!
Like aloeswood planted by the Lord"
"Your throne, O God, is forever and ever;
A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your kingdom.
You love righteousness and hate wickedness;
Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You
With the oil of gladness more than Your companions.
All Your garments are scented with myrrh and aloeswood and cassia,
Out of the ivory palaces, by which they have made You glad."
" And Nicodemus, who at first came to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloeswood, about a hundred pounds. Then they took the body of Jesus, and bound it in strips of linen with the spices, as the custom of the Jews is to bury."
"The Lord said to Moses, 'Take the finest spices: of liquid myrrh... and of cassia"
"You shall sprinkle me with Hyssop, and I shall be made clean, you shall wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow." -
250$
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Cy Twombly's epic 10-part painting, Coronation of Sesostris, is a singular focus of an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York. The painting is a response to Twombly's fascination with war and is compared to Beethoven's Eroica symphony in the way it dashes through emotional extremes and pounding cadences. The painting depicts the solar barge of Sesostris mythologized by the sun god Ra in his journey across the sky. The exhibition presents a complex tango between image and text where both mediums are metaphoric translations of each other. The edge between them creates a space of incongruence and paradox, which is pungently defined, with verbal meaning of the script and visceral sensation of the paint alternating in focus, hinging upon each other as they dance.
The cycle can be seen as a kind of symphony of emotional extremes, with alternating rushes of the funereal, the rhapsodic, and the majestic. The bittersweet nature of desire is evoked through the text inscribed on the paintings, particularly the fragments of Sappho's poetry, further heighten this sense of the paradoxical nature of desire, as they describe the "sensational crisis" of joy and pain coexisting.
At the same time, the painting's use of both image and text, and the way they interact with each other, creates a space of incongruence and paradox that mirrors the tensions and contradictions inherent in desire. Image and text can never have a literal correspondence, and instead can only be metaphoric translations of each other. This suggests that meaning itself is a kind of negotiation between different forms of representation, and that our attempts to understand the world around us are always mediated by the limits of language and perception.
notes: tobacco, castoreum, immortelle, benzoin, deer musk, myrrh, labdanum -
250$
Coronation of Sesostris
Extrait de Parfum
Ground-Zero Standards
Extrait de Parfum
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Ground-Zero is a Japanese experimental band that was formed in 1985 by multi-instrumentalist and composer Otomo Yoshihide. Their last work, "Plays Standards" is a amazing record featuring the band's unique interpretations of classic jazz standards, such as "Take the A Train," "Giant Steps," and "St. Louis Blues." The album is a testament to the band's versatility and ability to reimagine traditional music in new and exciting ways.
While their interpretations may be wildly different from the original recordings, there is a deep respect and admiration for the source material that shines through in each track. By reimagining classic jazz standards in their own image, the band challenges listeners to think differently about what music can be and to embrace the unexpected.
notes: jasmine, sweet acorn, sandalwood, amber, aldehydes, leather -
250$
“The truly blessed are not the ones who can work miracles or see angels. The truly blessed are the ones who can see their own sins.”
Adam’s Lament
Extrait de Parfum
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Notes: vanilla absolute, sandalwood absolute, vanilla pod co-tincture (planifolia, tahitensis, Madagascar,) madagascar peppercorn co-tincture (pink/black) Mysore sandalwood vintage oil 2004
St. Silouan:
My soul wearies for the Lord, and I seek Him in tears.
How should I not seek Him?
When I was with Him my soul was glad and at rest, and the enemy could not come nigh me.
But now the spirit of evil has gained power over me, harassing and oppressing my soul, so that I weary for the Lord even unto death, and my spirit strains to God,
and there is nought on earth can make me glad,
Nor can my soul take comfort in any thing, but longs once more to see the Lord,
that her hunger may be appeased.
I cannot forget Him for a single moment, and my soul languishes after Him,
and from the multitude of my afflictions
Lift up my voice and cry:
"Have mercy upon me, O God. Have mercy on Thy fallen creature." -
250$
Desert Water
Extrait de Parfum
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Notes: Black Sacra Tincture, Black Spruce Concrete, Silver Fir tincture, Green Hojari Tincture, White
Ambergris Tincture.
Juice is pitch black, and will stain.
O Father Anthony, you imitated zealous Elijah.
You followed the straight paths of the Baptist and became a desert dweller.
By prayer you confirmed the universe.
Wherefore, intercede with Christ our God to save our souls. -
250$