Sharp by Andrea Maack

Two days ago was my birthday and the fragrance I chose to wear that day was "Sharp" by Andrea Maack. It turned out to be a very good choice. As I have two little kids I don't have to much time for pursuing my own interests (perfumes are an exception, thinking about how you smell is one of the few things you actually can do while taking care of small kids). But since it was my birthday I got a few hours to myself in order to bake a decent cake.

The cake I went for had had 2 chocolate cake layers and a filling consisting of vanilla/mascarpone cream and strawberries. I didn't manage to get a photo of itcake before it was gone, but I found a photo of a cake made from the same recipe ("Strawberry Celebration Cake" from Bittersweet by Alice Medrich, highly recommended btw) at the Mad Bakers blog, and this is what it looks like:

Sharp, my scent of the day, started out very much like the cream filling in the middle. Lots of soft, sweet, dreamy vanilla mixed with wild strawberries. The note that I interpret as strawberries is an interesting one. It's milky and a bit artificial, like those strawberry milkshakes that don't contain any real strawberries. It also reminds me of paper. This I find very intriguing, I've never thought of strawberries and paper smelling anything alike before. After a while the strawberries left and there was mostly vanilla left. I also got chocolate at times and that really made me really feel like my cake :)

The official sales texts talk about Sharp being a soft scent with a subtle poison note hiding behind all the lull, hence the name. First I thought this being  just nonsense. I can imagine a sales person coming up with something like this in order to make a scent seem more interesting. I could also imagine people, wearing Sharp, going "Ehhh.....ummmm... yes, now I do get a little sharpness..... ehhh....ummmm....very interesting...hmmm", but really not feeling a thing at all. An "The Emperors New Clothes" type of practical joke.

But then, after spending some hours inside a cloud of vanilla, there is this tiny hint of something dirty. All of a sudden I'm getting sawdust left on stable floors to soak up the horses urine. Later during drydown there is sea water and musky sweat. And that paper again, but different now, not as sweet. What happened? This little darling of a scent went from a super sweet vanilla to a salty, dirty one. A birthday cake stumbling upon hard times? Or did she grow up into a pony girl?

All the scents in Andrea Maacks line are interpretations of her artwork. Above is the picture that goes with Sharp. I'm not sure I get the connection, but maybe it's about a facade breaking up and you get to see what is underneath? Or about how life moves in mysterious ways? Or maybe something completely different?

I'm rating Sharp a 4 out of 5. The start is way to sweet for me. I'm fine matching a birthday cake scentwise one day in a year but not more. Great for people who like sweet foody vanillas though. The drydown, however, I love it! I don't have a straightforward relationship with vanilla but with enough dirt and edge mixed in, then we're talking! I'm overall very impressed with both Andrea Maack fragrances I've tried. They are interesting and unique and longlivity is great.

Craft by Andrea Maack

According to Wikipedia: "Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events, that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner." This happens to me so often I'm sometimes wondering if I have a team of supernatural beings working full time hitting me over the head.

The other day I wrote a blog post about Perfume Shopping in Iceland. The next day I went visiting my favourite perfume store here in Stockholm, Cow Parfymeri, in order to smell their Amorages. When I stood there, complentating my smelly wrists, I saw a perfume line that I had never seen before. There were no labels on the sides of them so I turned one upside down and guess what? They were made in Reykjavík, Iceland. Unknowingly, I had stumbled over Andrea Maacks line. She is an visual artist and she has had 3 perfumes made that are supposed to be olfactory representations of her artistic work.

The first one that I've tried is "Craft", a very unusual scent. The piece of work it's representing is a jacket, seen below:

And here is the print on the jacket, an intricate, organic pattern of pencil lines:

So, how does this smell? At Andrea Maacks website Craft is being described as: "Like being lost in a foggy forest with metallic trees and citrus fruits hanging from the metallic branches." Does this sound weird? The funny thing is that once you sniff the perfume it makes perfect sense. First, there is a strong burst of tonic water mixed with bitter grapefruit rind and metal. I'm also reminded of the chemical taste of aspirine. The citrus note comes from eleni, a resin with a spicy and citrusy scent. There is no sweetness whatsoever and if this will not wake you up, nothing will.

After a while, the tonic metal seamlessly moves on towards cedarwood. For a while the scent notes seem to be jumping between tonic and wood every other time I smell. At the end there is patchouli, and once you've come this far you realise that is has been there all the time, nudging everything else along.

So, is this something anyone would want to wear? Yes, considering the metalness, it's suprisingly wearable. It's great on a scorching summers day when you want your drinks to be dry, tart and bitter and just can't stand anything too florid. If I was to describe Craft in one sentence it would be a "High-tech and long lasting gin-and-tonic cologne". I'm rating it 4 out of 5.

Samples of all Andrea Maacks fragrances are available on Luckyscent.

Pics: www.andreamaack.com