Filippo Sorcinelli
LAVS
The Story
LAVS is named for the atelier Filippo Sorcinelli founded in 2001 to make sacred vestments, work that has since dressed three popes. He was a cathedral organist before that, and the perfume is the incense of incenses, made to complete the smells of that atelier.
Amber
Resin warmed until it goes sweet
Labdanum, benzoin and vanilla melted together into something sweet but dusky, like tree sap gone soft in the sun with a thread of incense smoke through it. Amber does not sparkle or shout. It sits close to the skin and gives off heat for hours.
Aromatic
Crushed herbs in cool air
The green, camphorous coolness of lavender, rosemary, sage, and thyme, like herbs bruised between the fingers. It feels clean, invigorating, and a touch austere, the crisp backbone of a classic barbershop freshness.
Warm Spicy
Glowing embers of the spice drawer
The rounded heat of cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg, dry and slightly resinous, like a baking pantry rather than a sharp kitchen. It creates a flushed, enveloping warmth that feels intimate and cool-weather, hugging the skin from within.
Balsamic
Tree sap gone thick and golden
Tree resins and golden amber, thickened to syrup and touched with vanilla. It does not sparkle or move; it settles, warming the skin the way candlelight warms a room, and it stays there long after the top notes have gone quiet.
Fresh Spicy
Cool bite of cracked pepper
Pink pepper, cardamom and ginger, spice that prickles rather than warms. It fizzes near the top of a fragrance, dry and faceted, closer to crushed peppercorns and a split cardamom pod than to anything simmering in a kitchen. Bright, never comforting.
Woody
Dry grain of cut timber
The smell of cedar shavings, sandalwood, and dry vetiver roots, a sanded, resinous warmth with a faint pencil-box rasp. It feels grounded and composed, the quiet backbone that makes a scent read as serious and lasting.
Black Pepper
Dry heat that prickles and sharpens
What it is
Peppercorns start out green; drying is what turns them black and wrinkled. They grow on a climbing vine, and the scent is drawn out by steam or by CO2.
How it smells
Sharp and dry, a bite that tingles the inside of your nose. Underneath, woody and resinous with a lift of citrus. The distilled oil is airy; the CO2 extract smells like a peppercorn cracked a second ago.
In perfumery
It snaps a fragrance awake from the top, then works lower down as a foil for rose, vetiver and amber. Some are built on nothing but that dry crackle over cedar, which turns out to be enough.
Good to know
Pepper was once used as currency and accepted as rent. And the heat you taste is piperine, which is too heavy to travel in a distillation, so the oil smells peppery without burning anything at all.
Cardamom
Green spice cracking open with citrus heat
What it is
Pickers take the pods before they ripen, which means doing it by hand. A ginger relative from the forests of southern India, now farmed widely in Guatemala. The seeds inside are what gets distilled.
How it smells
Crack one and you get cool eucalyptus lift over warm pepper, lemon peel and a little pine resin. There is a smoky breadiness in it too, the smell of chai. Sharp and effervescent first, then soft and balsamic.
In perfumery
It sits between top and heart, a spice sparkle that stays cool, letting a composition move from citrus into woody amber without the weight of clove or cinnamon. Rose, leather and oud all take it well.
Good to know
The pod is packaging. Sealed, it keeps the oil intact; cracked, the aroma starts escaping straight away, which is why distillers work fast and why pre-ground cardamom is a ghost of the whole pod.
Jasmine
The heady white flower at perfumery's beating heart
What it is
Picking runs by hand in the dark, from before first light into the morning. The blossoms are too fragile to distill, so solvent lifts their oil into a waxy concrete, and alcohol washes the absolute out of that.
How it smells
Sweet, heavy and honeyed, with something faintly animal underneath. Sambac reads green, tea-like and luminous; grandiflorum is fruitier, creamier, heavier on the skin. Both dry down warm and soft, with a mushroomy musk you notice only up close.
In perfumery
Put it in the heart and it ties a citrus opening to the woods underneath, adding volume to both. Rose, tuberose, sandalwood and musk all take it well. Plenty of perfumes are built on jasmine and nothing else.
Good to know
Roughly six thousand hand-picked blossoms go into one gram of absolute, among the costliest materials in perfumery. Part of its depth is indole, which smells like decay when concentrated and turns radiant at the trace the flower carries.
Elemi
The bright, lemon-peppered cousin of frankincense
What it is
Cut the bark of a Philippine tree and it weeps a soft white gum that yellows in the air. Steam-distilled, that resin becomes elemi: a first cousin of frankincense that arrives smelling of lemon peel.
How it smells
Sharp lemon and pine up front, with a green pepper snap. Underneath, something oddly herbal: dill and fennel over warm balsam, threaded with incense smoke. It dries soft and woody, much lighter than its frankincense relatives.
In perfumery
Perfumers use it as a hinge. It sits high in the blend, carrying citrus brightness down into woods and incense so the join never shows, and it lets a resinous composition glow without turning heavy or smoky.
Good to know
Its name is usually traced to the Greek enhaemon, a blood-staunching medicine described by Pliny. Long before perfumery it went into Renaissance healing balms and varnish, and the resin still yields oil generously enough to stay affordable.
Labdanum
Sticky amber resin scraped from sun-baked rockrose
What it is
A Mediterranean rockrose sweats gum through its leaves in summer, dark and sticky enough to glue your fingers together. Harvesters boil or scrape the branches to get it off, then extract that crude gum into absolute and resinoid.
How it smells
Balsamic warmth, then leather, dried fruit, honey and a curl of smoke. There is something almost ambergris-like in the opening. Hours later it has settled into brown tobacco and worn skin, still going.
In perfumery
Take labdanum out and most amber accords collapse; it is what vanilla and benzoin get built on. It fixes a formula in place, gives chypres and leathers their depth, and sits well with rose, oakmoss and incense.
Good to know
Before there was distillation, there were goats. Herds browsed through cistus scrub all summer, the gum matted into their beards and thighs, and shepherds combed it out. Labdanum is one of the oldest aromatic materials still in use.
Cloves
Warm pinpricks of dark, resinous spice
What it is
A clove never gets to flower. The buds come off the tree still shut, dry in the sun until they are hard and dark brown, and go either to the spice rack or to the still.
How it smells
Hot and sweet at once, with a numbing medicinal bite anyone who has sat in a dentist's chair will know. Underneath, woody and balsamic and faintly fruity. The tingle is eugenol, and it reads as carnation.
In perfumery
A few drops in the heart pull rose and ylang somewhere warmer and more old-fashioned, and give vanilla and ambery resins a dry, biting edge. Plenty of classic spicy fragrances open on clove.
Good to know
Cloves once started trade wars: the Dutch cut down whole groves to corner the supply. The modern constraint is duller but real. Eugenol sensitises skin, so perfumers dose the oil lightly and build the rest from other spices.
Coriander
Spice that smells nothing like cilantro
What it is
Same plant, two smells. The ripe seed dries warm and woody; the fresh leaf, sold as cilantro, is another thing entirely and almost never sees a perfume. Only the crushed seed goes to the still.
How it smells
Warm and sweet up front, with a peppery lift and a squeeze of citrus. Then it rounds out: lavender, rosewood, a faint gingerbread warmth that sits closer to a fougere than a spice rack.
In perfumery
Perfumers slot it between top and heart for freshness, spice and a lavender-like roundness, alongside bergamot, lavender, geranium and ambery bases. It is a classic heart in vintage citrus-aromatics and all over the fougeres.
Good to know
Archaeologists found coriander seeds sealed in Tutankhamun's tomb, one of the oldest spices anyone bothered to farm. The oil is mostly linalool, which gives perfumers a rounder, gentler source of that smell than the isolated molecule.
Opoponax
Sweet myrrh purring honey, balsam and old wood
What it is
Sweet myrrh starts as sap. Cut the bark of a Commiphora in Somalia or Ethiopia and it bleeds a gum that hardens into reddish tears, steamed for oil or washed out with solvent into a resinoid.
How it smells
Rounder and sweeter than myrrh, honeyed rather than medicinal, with a small effervescent lift as it opens. Underneath it goes dusty and faintly animalic, a little mushroomy, dry as old wood. Think benzoin, drier and powdery.
In perfumery
A base note that also fixes, holding other materials in place while it gives amber accords their honeyed glow. It can lift a chypre from higher up. Labdanum, vanilla, incense and rose are the company it keeps.
Good to know
Two different plants answer to this name. The old European opoponax was a Mediterranean relative of parsley; the resin sold to perfumers today comes from an African tree that is not related to it at all.
Oakmoss
The damp green soul of the forest floor
What it is
Not a moss at all, but a lichen, scraped off oak and other deciduous bark across temperate Europe, Russia and North Africa. Solvents turn the harvested growth into a dark, viscous concrete, then the absolute perfumers actually use.
How it smells
Wet stone, damp bark and something inky and leathery underneath, dry and faintly bitter. This is not fresh green: it is the cool floor beneath old trees after rain has soaked the ground.
In perfumery
The backbone of the chypre: a base note that gives a fragrance its shadow and its spine, classically under bergamot, beside labdanum and patchouli. Anything described as mossy, vintage or green-masculine is usually leaning on it.
Good to know
Oakmoss carries two allergens, atranol and chloroatranol, potent enough that the EU banned them from cosmetics outright. Perfumers use stripped grades now, but it was the earlier cap on the extract that changed how the classic chypre smells.
Palisander Rosewood
Creamy rose-wood with a peachy glow
What it is
Perfumery's rosewood is bois de rose, an Amazonian laurel whose freshly cut timber smells of roses. It is not the palisander of furniture and guitar backs, which is a different tree entirely.
How it smells
Sweet, rosy and creamy rather than dry, with a peachy blush and a faint camphor lift on the opening. Lighter than sandalwood, more floral than cedar. The drydown is warm, balsamic and rounded.
In perfumery
A heart note that sits between the florals and the woods, brightening both. Rose, jasmine, vetiver and citrus all take to it, and many of the great aldehydic florals leaned on Brazilian rosewood oil.
Good to know
Almost no plant carries more linalool: the oil ran up to ninety percent of it, and cutting for that molecule stripped out the wild stands. The sustainable route now is oil distilled from leaves and twigs pruned off planted trees, which are left standing.
Amber
A warm resinous glow built, not harvested
What it is
There is no amber tree. Perfumers assemble the smell from labdanum, the sticky gum that bleeds off a Mediterranean rockrose in summer heat, plus benzoin and vanilla. The fossilized resin in museum cases is odorless on skin.
How it smells
Honeyed and faintly animalic at first, then it settles into golden powdery warmth: beeswax, old tobacco, worn leather, a thread of smoke underneath. It stays close to the skin rather than filling the room.
In perfumery
It sits at the base and holds everything above it in place, which is why oriental compositions lean on it so hard. Vanilla and patchouli push it sweet; more resin, spice and dry herbs push it austere.
Good to know
The word once meant ambergris, the waxy secretion of sperm whales, and the confusion never cleared. The trade now uses amber for two things: this resin accord, almost always plant and synthetic, and the ambergris substitutes like Ambroxan.
Tonka Bean
Warm almond-vanilla sweetness with a hay-tobacco shadow
What it is
Shelled seeds from a South American legume tree go into alcohol, then dry for weeks until coumarin crystallizes across their skins like frost. That frosted bean is what becomes the absolute perfumers use.
How it smells
Vanilla and bitter almond first, then hay, dried tobacco and something toasted. The opening is close to caramelized custard; the drydown goes powdery and boozy, with cinnamon and cut clover in it. Hazier than vanilla, softer than almond.
In perfumery
Between heart and base, it sweetens without turning sharp. Lavender, amber and tobacco all take to it. Coumarin, first pulled out of this seed, built the fougère family, though the 1882 original ran on the synthetic version.
Good to know
Tonka owes most of its scent to coumarin, which American food regulators banned in 1954 after high doses damaged the livers of lab animals. The bean is effectively illegal in a US kitchen and perfectly legal on skin.
Fragrance Character
The opening strikes hard, pepper and cardamom crackling against a thread of jasmine that reads more solemn than floral. Elemi and cloves push the heart into liturgical resin, labdanum adding a thick, animalic warmth beneath. The drydown belongs to opoponax and oakmoss, a slow, balsamic fade that sits close to the skin like worn velvet, tonka rounding the edges without sweetening.
Longevity
how long it stays on skin
The hourglass reads wear time: how many hours the fragrance keeps speaking before it fades. A bar that barely leaves the start means a few fleeting hours. One that runs the full length carries from morning into evening. Treat it as typical, not promised. Oily skin holds scent far longer than dry.
Sillage
the size of its scent trail
Sillage is French for a ship's wake, and that is exactly what this measures: how much of the scent reaches the room instead of staying on you. Low is a whisper only close friends catch. Enormous fills the room, then keeps filling it after you leave.
Experimental
Built to provoke, not to please
Some perfumes are made to be liked. These are made to be argued about: inky tar, hot rubber, fruit on the turn, metal and fur where you expected flowers. The coin glows for a scent that provokes and dims for one that plays it safe, which is sometimes the point.
Office
Polished, and never louder than the room
Scent is manners in a shared room. At this range it should reach the person across the desk and stop there: tidy citrus, soft musk, pale woods, all of it reading competent and considerate. A glowing coin means nobody has to mention it. A dim one means it travels.
Evening
After dark, when it deepens
Dinner, drinks, the night that runs long. Low light is where ambers, resins and smoky woods stop being polite, and where a plush floral finally blooms. A glowing coin means it is waiting for exactly this hour. A dim one means it did its best work in daylight.
Romantic
Close enough to be felt
A fragrance can hum against skin instead of announcing itself across a table. That is the register here: creamy florals, vanilla, soft musk, a thread of spice, warm enough to make someone lean in. The coin glows when a scent sets that mood and dims when it is more practical than seductive.
Formal
Quiet authority in a dressed-up room
A wedding, a ceremony, a room where everyone has thought about their shoes. What works here is structure, not volume: smooth woods, disciplined florals, soft leather. A glowing coin means it holds its posture all evening. A dim one means it is too casual for the room.
Casual
Easy comfort for unhurried days
Errands, coffee, a slow Saturday with nowhere to be. Nothing here has to impress anyone, so the fit is soft and easy: fresh citrus, light woods, a little warmth off the skin. A glowing coin says yes to all that. A dim one means the fragrance is asking for a bigger night.
Day to Night
where its mood naturally falls
A bar running from sun to moon, reading the hour the fragrance was made for. The more of it that stays gold, the more the scent belongs to daylight and open air. The further the blue reaches back toward the sun, the deeper and warmer it turns: evening, candlelight, low rooms.
Winter
Warmth that carries through cold air
Cold air mutes a fragrance and slows it down, which is why winter belongs to the dense and the warm: resin, smoke, vanilla, leather, ambered spice. The bar reads how well this one pushes back, glowing against the chill instead of thinning out in it.
Spring
Fresh blooms in mild, rising warmth
Mild, humid air lifts a light composition, so the season belongs to dewy florals, green stems, soft powder and citrus you can see through. Alive rather than heavy. The further the green runs along the bar, the more comfortably this one wears in that weather.
Summer
Bright and airy in real heat
Heat does the projecting for you, which is why the wrong perfume turns unbearable by noon. What survives is cool and breathable: sharp citrus, salt air, aromatic herbs, water. Things that refresh instead of cloy. A short bar here means save it for cooler months.
Fall
Spiced warmth for cooling days
As the air cools, the rich materials stop smothering and start reading clearly: dry woods, warm spice, tobacco, amber, fruit gone golden. It is the season perfume turns contemplative. The bar fills according to how naturally this one settles into crisp, cooling days.
Best Worn
For the coldest autumn nights and the depth of winter, a fragrance for dressed-up, refined occasions and the kind of solitary evening the adventurous wear for its own sake, its resinous incense commanding quiet. A decant answers the only question that matters: whether it is possible to live inside it.
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The Vibe
The Nose
Filippo Sorcinelli
Founder and perfumer
Italian organist and sacred-vestment maker whose LAVS atelier has dressed Popes Benedict XVI, Francis and Leo XIV. He created the UNUM line, and no perfumer is named on its scents. The line includes UNUM LAVS, Opus 1144, Rosa Nigra and Ennui Noir.
More by this noseReliqviaSacristie Des Arbres
The Maison
Sacristy incense and cold cathedral stone, turned into extrait.
Filippo Sorcinelli builds fragrance the way a cathedral organist builds sound: slow, resinous and unafraid of the dark. As the mind behind UNUM he works in incense and smoke, in the hush of stone interiors and the weight of vestments, so a composition feels less like a scent you spray and more like a room you step into. The blending itself is left to a nose who prefers to stay anonymous.
- Origin
- Mondolfo, Italy
- Founded
- 2014
- Known for
- Liturgical incense, UNUM
EVERY DECANT
From the original bottle to your door
We buy the original flacon at full retail price, direct from the house.
A medical grade Socorex syringe takes the exact millilitres straight from the flacon.
Packed into the hot foiled box and handed to DHL, every duty already paid. How a decant is made
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