Couple Making Love Behind a Folding Screen

[doomsday_disco]

Polished ebony, honeyed tea, lemon peel, plum rind, blueberry blossom silk, and white mint.

[gentle-twig]

This blend checked a number of shunga boxes for me: polished woods, honey, tea, and silk notes. I was curious about mint, and plum can often work on me. But I was concerned that it may go haywire. Bluberry blossom? And would the plum combined with lemon and mint go too fresh, too shampoo? Reader, fear not. My worries were unfounded, and this indeed provides a wonderful shunga experience that is also different from other scents I have tried.
 

On me this is mostly about the blueberry (blossom silk), plum, ebony, and mint for the first several hours. The blueberry is the first note I experience, and it doesn’t smell particularly floral or silky. In fact, it has an almost gourmand, cooked blueberry nuance, an almost spicy character that some berries and other fruits have that really helps balance the sharpness of the plum rind. Together, they produce a lovely dark fantasy fruit that is suspended between the dry ebony wood and a hovering, subtle, but glorious mint. Indeed, the mint helps this whole scent almost to glow—maybe the silk is helping out here too. I don’t get the classic aldehyde silk, but there is a certain steamy impression I associate with the first lab silk scent I ever tried, Impressions of the Floating World. There is a suggestion almost of a landscape in the contrast between bright chilly mint and dark fruits and woods, a decidedly moonlit landscape, dark and cool-toned, filled with snowy peaks and valleys deep in shadow 
 

But the scent is more complex even than this, and for me suggests almost the perceptual alternation of an illusory nocturnal landscape (atmospheric, airy herbs and fruits), and the insistent material fact that this is (in my imagination) a landscape painted or carved on an ebony folding screen. About four hours in, the honeyed tea comes to the fore. For some time before, I perceive it as a vague chocolatey quality that I think is part of the otherwise bone dry ebony. But as it comes into its own I recognize it as the honeyed tea, as if I zoom out from the landscape scene to find myself cozily contemplating it in its frame with a cup of (black) tea steaming before me. The tea plays so nicely with everything else going on here, especially the ebony. And so even as its arrival signals a drastic shift for me—from

exterior to interior, from night today, from cool to warm, and from nature to artifice—I find it quite welcome, and oddly consistent with what has come before. 

Despite the ephemeral quality of some of the notes here, the tea, honey, and ebony do not blot out mint, fruit, or silk. Somehow all these notes stick around all day for me and the scent just seems to build up in layers. 
 

I’m really glad I got to experience this blend, and I will probably get a full bottle. We’ll see, though, because my shunga decants are all so tempting!