D.S. & Durga: El Cosmico

El Cosmico: The Smell of a Sunbaked, Psychedelic Desert

El Cosmico is a scent that deeply and immediately resonated within the core of who I am.

The thing is, I'm *from* the desert. I was born and have lived my whole life in the desert southwest.

*El Paso*...*El Cosmico"...

My Mexican heritage presumes my second language ability, so when I see something written in Spanish, my eye is naturally drawn. I cognize and recognize, understand, and then all sorts of concepts arise: is this supposed to evoke thoughts of something Mexican? Spanish? Otherwise Latin-inspired?

My curiosity sufficiently piqued, I finally acquired a small sample of it and was hit with a feeling that I can only describe with words like "primordial," "innate," and maybe "psychedelic?"

Because El Cosmico feels so…cosmico…and so deeply personal, which I realize is a little paradoxical, because the cosmos is the opposite of "about me," but this scent feels so ancestral that it's nothing but.

But just the way words are never enough for life's most vivid experiences, none of these nebulous attempts at describing El Cosmico really suffice.

So let's switch gears, and come back down to Earth for a moment to talk about this in terms that are more chewable.

This is mostly a fragrance featuring lemony pine and desert medicine.

It takes a lot for anything to thrive in a desert, and people who haven't spent time in one are missing out on an Amazon-rainforest-level treasure trove of nature that isn't found anywhere else.

So when I say, "desert medicine," I can only hope that readers can meet me halfway to imagine what that's like. Take creosote, one of the notes in El Cosmico that made me question whether the perfumers were secretly talking about my actual home city. Creosote...who on earth would have known that it's the defining scent of this place, unless you grew up here? D.S. & Durga.

Creosote is herbal and camphorous, arid yet vaporous...it could easily be included in a therapeutic steam bath intended to open up your airways. In the desert, such things sometimes also open your mind.

And the petrichor here?

The ancient rocks, fossil-stamped and baking beneath the sun after a deliciously rare and welcome rainfall--what are they like? Hot and subtly sweet, as if distilling fresh chamomile steam into the air. Damp and warm, but refreshing and exhilarating. Very clean, purified.

There are wild grasses in the desert, too: "khella," says the scent profile for El Cosmico. While not native to this area, it thrives in similar regions of North Africa and the Mediterranean. I've never experienced it in real life but it's said to be sun-scorched and hay-like, not green and dewy. Slightly bitter and grounding.

Then there's also the fact that D.S. & Durga have beautifully captured the smell of sand. You didn't think there was such a well-defined scent for plain, brown sand, but there is. It's lightly metallic, parched and dusty, with scorpion and snake holes.

And if you were to dig—to try and reach some water or maybe plant something green—you'd reach the desert's first layer of defense against extreme heat: clay. White and solid, hard as rocks, but easily scratched and broken into cool, chalky, mineralic powder.

El Cosmico also features a perplexing note of ants walking along the trunk of a tree. Not exactly the formic acid usually associated with ant smells—this is more like a banana peel left to bake in the sun. And, yes, oak.

El Cosmico paints such a vivid picture of the desert that it really can almost take you there. This fragrance would make an especially magical adventure if you've never visited a desert in real life—I honestly don't think that you could be prepared for it, if you've not experienced an actual desert before. The images conjured in this perfume are so lifelike that they can very nearly replace “you” with some other-world version of you—a lone observer in this new-to-you world. You, but in "Red Dead Redemption," as John Marston, sleeping by a shadowy ridge.