Atelier Cologne: Emeraude Agar
The Scent of Rain and Ancient Incense
My scent obsession initially began with incense.
A very kind and super smart guy at Olfactory Rescue Service (hi, Mike!) once sent me and my brother a bunch of different brands of incense, and in return, we sent him a box from Tashi Lhunpo Monastery (a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, now re-established in India), called Shing Kham Kun Khyab. It's a recipe that's thousands of years old.
It smells exactly like the earth after rain and it's quite possibly my favorite scent on the planet. Atelier’s Emeraude Agar is a wearable version of that smell, while somehow not being a typical incense-style scent. That genre typically leans very masculine, spicy and a little bit heavy for everyday use—not the case for this fragrance at all.
A lot of rain-themed perfumes play with mineralic tones, too, but here Atelier has captured a slightly confounding dichotomy: the mineralic freshness of water drunk out of Mexican barro vessels, but also the soft sweetness of distilled water. Ultra-purified water and mineral water should be polar opposites, but here they intermingle in impossible alchemy.
Letting my imagination run a little further, I'm suddenly caught by another impression: wood. And at last the namesake ingredient takes its rightful place in the spotlight, as I realize that this isn't wood as we normally find it in perfumery—woods are usually drier or smoky. Despite my entire post revolving around Emeraude Agar's similarity to an incense, it manages not to be smoky. At most it could smell something akin to an aloeswood incense stick that's been burned and put out. So, the insinuation of smoke is there, but I couldn't rightfully call this a smoky scent, the way some campfire perfumes are. Instead, this is something of a dampened wood, like a piece of Palo Azul bark after you've finished cold-brewing it for tea.
I spent a long time during my incense exploration days searching for a proper rain smell, and then I spent as long searching for it in the perfume world.
Agarwood is an ingredient commonly found in incense, but I’d never experienced one whose backdrop was so very clean and empty of all the muskier things in most traditional incense recipes. So, when I found that same clean rain smell bottled by Atelier, I was overjoyed.
Petrichor can be lemony…I didn’t want that.
Ozonic notes can be sharp…I didn’t want that.
Aquatic notes can be musty…I didn’t want that, either.
Emeraude Agar (like that Tibetan incense) is probably reminding me of my own city’s petrichor, which is such a very complex thing to capture or describe. The best I can do is paint you a picture: a brown, desert dirt landscape, encroached upon by brick and stucco houses and rock walls, grey pavement, and whatever extra-tenacious plants manage to survive and push through the rock-hard clay of the earth.
When giant grey clouds hover low and heavy, you feel somewhat of a nervous energy in the air—a slight buzzing anticipation of the wild lightning and thunder that are on the way. Everyone seems to quicken a little—people and animals alike—to get inside if you need to, or to carefully peep out to witness this rare and precious event.
The smell you’ll find in Emeraude Agar is exactly what starts to fill the air a good half hour before any actual rain makes its way down, so if you love rainy days, that fragrant lead-up to the storm is super exciting.
All through the rainfall and well after, it persists along with a sort of blissful calm once it’s all over, too. With Emeraude Agar, Atelier gives us a chance to hold onto that experience even longer.
If you love the smell of pure, clean rain unembellished by a lot of other notes, you owe it to yourself to try it. And if you already love this perfume, do yourself a favor and go find an authentic box of this incense.
