Like Perfume Nostradamus, Chris Rusak has once again delivered the timeliest of remedies. At the end of April, we got After Every Ounce of Joy (Leaves My Body), a reflection on trauma that was deeply introspective and affecting.
Our collective trauma has only intensified in the six months since. Now, when everything else in the world feels so complex and heavy, Rusak gives us Relief, his new studio limited release. A perfume for pure enjoyment, for conjuring moments of beauty and ease.
I’ve wrestled with writing about Beast Mode for ten months now, and I still haven’t come up with anything that conveys its simple genius, the way it’s both beautiful and serious, austere and profound, how it feels like a safe embrace and a soft armor against the world. Rather than just continue to flounder, and say nothing at all, I’ve decided to take a collection of various thoughts and feelings that I’ve written down during different wearings of Beast Mode, and simply share them. I hope you find them intriguing.
Book of Shadows is a very inky scent, but it doesn’t smell like your typical “ink” perfume. It’s not the sludgy, sooty scent of India ink, and it’s not just some murky, mothbally cypriol to suggest inkiness. It’s the crisp, flowy, and purple-black scent of iron gall ink. Bitter and fruity-nutty like gum arabic, with a metallic sheen (that just flirts with being reminiscent of heme), I can imagine thick, dense downstrokes, hairlike upstrokes, and dainty flourishes. The “throw,” when I get a random sniff from arm’s length, sometimes reminds me of the sweet, rubbery-tinged smell of a good print shop ink