Toskovat Anarchist A♭: The Perfume That Smells Like Money

You have been waiting outside the church long enough for the snow to stop melting on your face. There is rye in your coat pocket, and against your chest a wallet that will not close, stuffed with banknotes gone soft as old cloth and credit cards as cold as cutlery. The door behind you opens for a moment and lets out candle wax and heavy smoke. Then it shuts, and you are left with the cold and the smell of your own money.

Toskovat Anarchist A♭, spelled Anarchist A_ on the Toskovat site, is a unisex extrait de mémoire by David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi, founder of the Bucharest house, released around Christmas 2022 as a critique of consumerism and hustle culture. The perfume opens on harsh plastic and whiskey, moves through banknotes, ink and candle wax, and mellows into incense. It suits autumn and winter evenings, and anyone who wants a perfume with an argument in it.

How to make a perfume smell like money

Jipa-Slivinschi told British Vogue in 2023 that he knew he wanted this perfume to smell like a wallet filled with money and credit cards. To capture the smell of old, dirty bales of money, he looked at what is inside it: what evaporates when cotton is processed, what is inside plastic or ink. Then the team tried their best to mimic it. He compares the work to a caricature artist's rather than a painter's, so the money in Anarchist is a likeness with the nose enlarged.

He was 25 when that interview ran. He had graduated in screenwriting during the pandemic, with film work stopped, and begun with 15 essential oils. Toskovat, the small-batch house he started in 2022, takes its name from the Russian verb for to yearn, and Anarchist arrived before that first year was out.

The snow is not weather

The first line of the house note list could be the contents of that coat: Credit Cards, Snow, Whiskey. The Snow stands for cocaine. Dazed made that plain, and Jipa-Slivinschi told the magazine the perfume aims to show how far we have moved from spirituality and community towards money, stimulants and distractions.

Lower down, the wallet gives way to the church: an Old Confession Room, Holy Water, Priest's Clothes. One retailer files Priest's Clothes and Holy Water as accords, because nobody has distilled a priest's clothes. Jipa-Slivinschi describes the incense as imposing and heavy, the kind where you feel intimidated by a big cathedral. The last note on the house list is a Plastic Bag.

A luxurious trashfire

Wearers meet that plastic first. On Parfumo, a divided room gives Anarchist 7.4 out of 10 for scent and keeps describing the same arc: a harsh, chemical opening that mellows into incense. The version worth keeping comes from one wearer, who gets acetone whiskey over dollar bills, smudged ink, then a moment of rest in a church. One review, titled luxurious trashfire, has frankincense lingering close to the skin. Beside it sits your local corrupted priest, the best portrait of the perfume: a rural priest who gambles at the casino and says morning mass smelling of whiskey.

Sceptics follow most of the strange perfumes that smell of gasoline and ink, and Anarchist has its share. One calls the object notes marketing and smells a dark, inky molten candle that barely changes. The critic Luca Turin wrote that the house's shocking top notes and gothic ingredient lists give way to law-abiding behaviour.

Anarchist, and the word printed upside down

Toskovat, Parfumo and Dazed all write the name Anarchist A_, with an underscore. The Toskovat site does not explain it, so the bottle has to. The front label prints Anarchist and, directly beneath it, upside down, Antichrist, the two words sharing one baseline like a reflection. The best reading of A_ is a second word held back.

Anarchist and Antichrist are also the rhyme that opens Anarchy in the U.K., the Sex Pistols single of 26 November 1976. John Lydon said it was the best rhyme he could devise for the first line.

Sold at Christmas

Toskovat released two perfumes around Christmas 2022, and Fragrantica announced them together. One, Things We Never Shared, comes with a memory of the week before Christmas. The other, Anarchist, is a perfume against buying, on sale for the holidays.

Nearly every Toskovat perfume carries a short first-person memory that opens on one formula: today, the narrator remembers something. For Inexcusable Evil, that something is destruction, and the text closes by telling the reader to hate all governments and love all people. For Anarchist it is hypocrisy.

On the card in the Anarchist box, they sell us love, faith, forgiveness, blessings, distraction and dreams, anything we will pay for. If they are hard to name, it could be because of us. Children follow white-collared promises, a phrase that fits a priest's collar and an office worker's equally well. The narrator stands waiting in the cold, snow on the face, rye in the pocket.

The last lines follow Nietzsche, who also wrote a book called The Antichrist. In The Gay Science his madman has God dead and killed by us. The card has society, dying and killed by us. The next question then stands word for word as in Walter Kaufmann's English translation: "How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?"

Anyone holding that card has already paid. Beside it in the box lie small black and white prints, and one of them shows a toddler playing with blocks on the floor of an open-plan office.

The collection plate

Anarchist goes on the plate first, and beside it three perfumes that share its wax, its priest and its month.

Toskovat Anarchist A♭ is an extrait de mémoire, and its bottle carries the argument on after the card is put away. From the back, letters reading remember show through the amber liquid.

Toskovat Domus Numeni is the closest relative Anarchist has in the house, an extrait de mémoire that shares its Candle Wax and Green Sacra Resin and turns them from accusation to grief. Its text addresses a lost father, and where Anarchist has Priest's Clothes, Domus Numeni has Father's Jacket. Three Metal Nails go in at the top with black pepper and palinka, and Grave Flowers at the bottom with dust and birch tar.

Filippo Sorcinelli LAVS is a spiced, resinous perfume from the man who actually makes priests' clothes. His atelier, LAVS, Laboratorio Atelier Vesti Sacre, founded in 2001, makes sacred vestments, and popes have worn them. Anarchist lists Priest's Clothes as an idea. Here the idea has a tailor, and the smell is black pepper and elemi over opoponax and oakmoss.

Adi Ale Van Decembrie 89 Freedom Elixir is a vanilla gourmand extrait composed by Jimmy Bodin, and it shares no note with Anarchist: a cold opening of apple, orange and lemon, then hazelnut, vanilla and rum. It belongs here for its date. The Romanian revolution ran from 16 to 25 December 1989, and Ceausescu was executed on Christmas Day. The perfume is that month as a schoolboy lived it in a village, with street fighting on the radio.

Thirty-three Christmases before Toskovat put a wallet filled with money in a bottle, a schoolboy in the same country kept an orange worth its weight in gold.

Frequently asked questions

What does Toskovat Anarchist A♭ smell like?

Toskovat Anarchist A♭ opens on harsh plastic and whiskey, moves through banknotes, ink and candle wax, and mellows into incense. Its notes include Credit Cards, Snow, Dirty Dollars, Holy Water, Old Confession Room, Priest's Clothes and Plastic Bag.

What does the name Anarchist A_ mean?

Anarchist A_ is best read as Anarchist Antichrist: the front label of the Toskovat perfume prints Anarchist with the word Antichrist upside down beneath it. The Toskovat site does not explain the underscore. The name also appears as Anarchist A-.

Who made Toskovat Anarchist A♭, and when?

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi, founder of the Bucharest house Toskovat, made Anarchist A♭, which was released around Christmas 2022 as a critique of consumerism and hustle culture. Its label reads extrait de mémoire, which retailers translate as extrait or extrait de parfum, and the Toskovat site gives no percentage.

Is Toskovat Anarchist A♭ unisex?

Yes. Toskovat Anarchist A♭ is sold as unisex and Parfumo lists it for women and men. One retailer places the perfume in autumn and winter, for evenings and special occasions.

How long does Toskovat Anarchist A♭ last?

Wearers disagree on how long Toskovat Anarchist A♭ lasts. Parfumo's community scores its longevity 7.8 out of 10, but the reviews shown on its page run from 3 to 10, and one wearer who loves the perfume gives it a 3.