Toskovat
Age of Innocence
The Story
Age of Innocence is an extrait de mémoire from Toskovat's 2022 debut, by David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi, founder and only perfumer of the Bucharest house. It remembers children on bicycles beside rushing cars, cotton candy in the exhaust, then a metallic screech: "The abrupt brake on youth." Natural oud runs under the sugar and hot rubber.
Sweet
Warm sugar you cannot quite name
Caramel, honey, spun sugar: sweetness that hovers between all three and never settles on one. This is the gourmand pull, the thing that makes someone lean in closer than they meant to, warm and soft and a half step short of edible.
Fruity
Peach skin, not lemon peel
Peach, pear, apple, berry: this is sweetness in the flesh rather than the rind, dewy and nectar-heavy where citrus is sharp and thin. It plays young and slightly greedy, the sort of ripeness you can almost feel running down a wrist.
Leathery
Smoke-cured hide and dark suede
A smoky, tannic richness that smells of tanned hide, worn saddles and birch tar, sometimes softened toward suede. It is assertive and animalic, the smell of polished boots and dim interiors, a note that has clearly been somewhere before it reached you.
Metallic
Cold steel and bright blood
A cool shimmer that is not the metal itself, which is odourless, but what skin gives up at the touch of a coin or a blade. Sharp and almost mineral, it lends a clean, modern coldness: a knife edge, the inside of a tin, bracing and faintly electric.
Smoky
Charred wood and rising embers
The dry, charred scent of burning wood, smoldering incense, and lingering ash, sometimes tarry, sometimes wispy and gray. It feels brooding and atmospheric, conjuring a dying fire and a cool current of air carrying its last breath.
Oud
What a tree makes when it is wounded
A dense, resinous wood that smells warm and slightly medicinal, with a leathery, animal-tinged smokiness and a sweet, almost barnyard funk underneath. It feels ancient and brooding, wrapping the skin in something thick and quietly powerful.
Bubblegum
Banana, pineapple and clove, blurred into pink
What it is
A flavour, not a fruit. Pink bubblegum blends fruit flavourings, a banana-like one common among them, into a tutti-frutti of pineapple or banana, warmed by cinnamon or clove, sometimes cherry or orange. Each maker guards its own formula.
How it smells
Sugar first, then fruit blurred on purpose: ripe banana and pineapple run together until no single one can be named, a bright citrus glint on top and a warm flicker of cinnamon or clove underneath. Round, candied, unmistakably pink.
In perfumery
Always built. A sweet, fruity material with a tutti-frutti, bubblegum lift leaves a blotter within the hour, so it only lights the opening; a sweet, caramelised one with a cotton candy afternote can hold the accord far longer.
Good to know
In 1928 Walter Diemer, a Fleer accountant in Philadelphia, made a gum that stretched into bubbles. It came out dingy grey, and the only dye to hand was red, diluted to pink. Fleer sold it as Dubble Bubble.
Cotton Candy
Hot sugar spun into a pink cloud
What it is
Spun sugar: melted in a whirling head, flung through tiny holes, set in midair as threads. Nashville's electric machine dates from 1897; the 1904 St Louis World's Fair made it famous as fairy floss.
How it smells
Hot sugar in fairground air: caramel caught before it browns, a glow of strawberry jam, a soft baked-bread warmth underneath. Paler and drier than toffee, it is the sweetness that reaches you from the stall before the floss does.
In perfumery
Perfumers often build it with a lab-made burnt-sugar note that smells just like the fairground and does not occur in nature. Mugler asked for the sweets of a childhood funfair. Angel (1992) answered with spun sugar over patchouli and cocoa; the modern gourmand family is dated from it.
Good to know
Dentists keep turning up in its story. William Morrison, who built the first electric machine with confectioner John C. Wharton, practised dentistry in Nashville, and the name cotton candy came in the 1920s from Josef Lascaux, another dentist.
Strawberry
Jam, candy and a green winey edge
What it is
Strawberry gives no oil worth having, so the note is a build. Two materials define it: furaneol for the jammy, faintly cooked depth, and the one perfumers call strawberry aldehyde, which is not an aldehyde, for the candy.
How it smells
Crushed ripe berry with the sugar slightly cooked into it, a green leafy edge on top and something winey underneath. It reads warmer and jammier than the fresh fruit ever does, closer to the jar than the garden.
In perfumery
It lifts florals and soft musks and builds dessert accords beside vanilla and cream, then leaves early, well before the woods underneath it. Furaneol is powerful enough that a heavy hand turns the whole thing to burnt caramel.
Good to know
Furaneol is also one of the compounds that makes pineapple and guava smell like themselves, which is why those accords share strawberry's jammy sweetness. Smell them side by side and the family resemblance is hard to unhear.
Metal Screech
Hot brake resin over a cold iron tang
What it is
A sound turned into a smell: the shriek of a hard stop. In life it has a scent, as brake pads, often bound with a hard resin, grind against a metal disc, heat climbs, and the resin begins to scorch.
How it smells
Acrid and hot at first: burnt resin with a rubbery, almost plastic bite. Then the tang we file under metal, which metal alone does not make: it forms when skin oils meet iron, mushroomy and metallic at once.
In perfumery
A brake cannot be distilled, so perfumers build the effect. The steel can come from a waxy, metallic note or from the hard green glint inside rose; the heat comes from smoky notes.
Good to know
New brake pads are bedded in with a run of controlled stops, partly to cook resin out of the pad face, and a friction smell in the cabin is expected. Later, the same smell warns of too much heat.
Rubber
Fresh tyre and warm latex, smoky and addictive
What it is
Nobody taps a tree for this. The note is assembled: birch tar for the smoke and leathery notes for the vulcanised part, none of it anywhere near a rubber plantation.
How it smells
Bitter, dry and powdery: a bicycle inner tube, a new car interior, a balloon held to your face. There is soot in it, and a thin sweetness, and then it warms into something soft and leathery, like skin.
In perfumery
It works best as a heart-to-base accent, giving a composition a dark, smoky edge without announcing itself. Vanilla, tar, leather and incense are its usual company, and in a well-built formula you notice the texture, not the rubber.
Good to know
A 1998 cult classic, discontinued in 2017, put a new-tyre accord next to smoky lapsang tea and vanilla, and turned an industrial smell into a comfort scent people still hunt for.
Gasoline
Sweetish fumes over hot asphalt and rubber
What it is
Never actual petrol, which is toxic and volatile. The note is engineered: solvent-bright isoparaffins, rubbery and phenolic facets, a mineral sweetness, all of it aimed at a smell most people enjoy and few admit to.
How it smells
Sharp and chemical, a sweet solvent rush over warm rubber, hot asphalt and metal. Something faintly narcotic lifts off the top before it dries into smoky, tarry warmth. Equal parts repellent and hard to stop smelling.
In perfumery
A provocative top-to-heart accent in niche and avant-garde work, shorthand for machinery, speed and city grit. Leather, rubber, incense and metallic notes hold it steady. Whole fragrances have been built on fuel and asphalt alone.
Good to know
That sweet lift everyone secretly likes comes largely from benzene and its relatives, which are carcinogenic and capped by regulators in fuel for exactly that reason. The accord keeps the thrill and leaves the chemistry in the tank.
Rose
Dewy sweetness over a green, peppery bite
What it is
Most perfumery rose is one of two: damascena from Bulgaria and Turkey, centifolia from Grasse. Whole blossoms are picked by hand from before sunrise until about ten thirty, then distilled into otto or solvent-extracted into absolute.
How it smells
Fresh, honeyed, green at the edges, with something dewy still on it. Spice and fruit sit underneath, and in the absolute a jammy darkness. Otto opens crisp and bright; absolute is warmer, smokier, closer to skin.
In perfumery
Rose behaves less like one note than a whole palette. It carries a perfume alone or vanishes into a chypre, turns dark against oud and patchouli, goes powdery beside violet, and holds a floral heart together.
Good to know
The two extractions are not the same bargain. Otto takes three to four thousand kilograms of blossoms to yield one kilogram of oil. Absolute, pulled out with solvent, gets there on roughly a seventh of the flowers.
Car Seats
Sun-warmed upholstery, a back seat in summer
What it is
Less a material than a room: the inside of a car, seats above all. Leather or vinyl, carpet, plastic trim and the glues holding them slowly breathe out the mix known as new car smell.
How it smells
Close and warm: hide or vinyl baked in a parked car, sweetish and faintly plastic, over dusty cloth and stale cabin air. Heat drives more of it out, which is why a summer back seat smells loudest.
In perfumery
There is no extract of car, so the note is built: a leather accord can stand for the upholstery, with plastic and powdery touches for trim and cloth. One supplier lists a ready-made new car base: clean, plastic, soapy, powdery.
Good to know
Not every market wants it. In 2017 Ford had eighteen 'golden noses' near Nanjing grading each interior material from not perceptible to extremely disturbing, since Chinese buyers prefer no smell; some North Americans buy sprays to bring it back.
Natural Oud
Real distilled agarwood, alive and shifting
What it is
The dark resin an Aquilaria tree, wild or cultivated, lays down to defend a wound. The heartwood is ground and slowly distilled, often after a soak of days or weeks that ferments the wood, then the oil is aged for years.
How it smells
Never a fixed note: resinous and smoky one minute, then leather, dried fruit, honey, earth, warm skin. Some open raw and animalic and settle into something meditative and golden. Rarely the same twice across an evening.
In perfumery
Sold by the gram, wildly variable, and regulated under CITES, which is why mainstream perfume mostly reaches for an accord instead. The real oil is sold as dehn al oud across the Gulf and distilled in small batches.
Good to know
The barnyard note that startles newcomers is the signature of fine Indian oils, a warm, hay-like animalic depth that reads as character rather than fault. Oils without it are just as real and far cleaner. Age smooths whatever harshness is left.
Haitian Vetiver
Grapefruit and green soap over roasted root
What it is
Half the world's vetiver comes off the limestone hills of southern Haiti, where the roots are washed, dried in the sun and steam-distilled. Some houses bottle it neat as Haitian khus; others build oud compositions on it.
How it smells
Zesty from the first second, a grapefruit-and-green-soap lift no other vetiver has. Under the sparkle sits a grassy, faintly floral creaminess and a roasted-root warmth, a whisper of burnt wood rather than a bonfire.
In perfumery
Heavy molecules leave slowly, so the root fixes a fragrance and, like oud, improves with age. It runs top to base in green and citrus work, and stands alone as a soliflore of root.
Good to know
Javanese is the dark, leathery, most intensely earthy one; Réunion Bourbon is rounder, mineral and nutty. Haitian is the bright, dry, faintly floral one, and when a fragrance says only "vetiver", this is usually what is in it.
Cade
Black smoke pulled from juniper wood
What it is
Juniper wood does not give this up willingly. Branches, roots and heartwood are baked in a sealed oven until they char, and the tar that sweats out is cleaned up into perfumery grade.
How it smells
Tar, creosote and hot leather, sharper and more medicinal than birch tar. It arrives acrid, like standing downwind of a bonfire, then loses the bite and settles into smoky resin with a thin sweetness under it.
In perfumery
Used by the drop, never the spoonful. A trace builds smoky leather, pine and forest accords; more than a trace and everything smells like a chimney.
Good to know
For centuries it sold as juniper tar, a folk remedy smeared on livestock and rubbed into scalps. The crude tar is too dirty for skin, so what reaches a perfumer is rectified and restricted.
Cedarwood
Dry pencil shavings and sun-warmed timber
What it is
The cedar in your closet or cedar chest is usually a juniper. Virginia and Texas cedar both are; among the cedars of perfumery, only Atlas and Himalayan are true Cedrus. The oil is steam-distilled from heartwood chips and sawmill dust.
How it smells
Freshly sharpened pencils, and the inside of a cedar chest. Virginia leans pencil-dry and balsamic; Atlas is sweeter, almost honeyed. Both carry a clean, faintly camphor-cool smoke that settles into sappy warmth.
In perfumery
A heart-to-base workhorse: dry structure other materials can lean on. It sits well with vetiver, rose, citrus and incense, and it is the smoke in the drydown of countless modern woody-ambers.
Good to know
Cedar rarely appears alone. Its molecules, reworked in the lab, form the backbone of a great many contemporary woody fragrances, which is why so much of the modern woody shelf smells faintly of a sharpened pencil.
Fragrance Character
Strawberry bubblegum and cotton candy come first, loud and sticky, with hot rubber and gasoline already rising under the sugar. The middle smells like the inside of a car: torn tyre, new seats, a metallic edge, rose barely softening it. Hours later natural oud turns funky and fermented over cade smoke, cedarwood and vetiver, and it still carries.
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
Autumn and winter, by day or after dark, for an evening out or any hour that wants something strange. It suits wearers who can live with candy sitting next to gasoline.
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The Vibe
The Nose
David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi
Founder and perfumer
Bucharest-based Romanian who came to perfumery from filmmaking and founded Toskovat' in 2022. He composed Toskovat' Inexcusable Evil, Toskovat' Age of Innocence, Toskovat' Anarchist A_, Toskovat' In the Belly of the Beast and Adi ale Van Gethsemane.
More by this noseInexcusable EvilLast Birthday CakePornstar (Noyau Doux)
The Maison
Perfume as short fiction. Gunpowder, cold iodine and burnt sugar tell stories most houses would never print.
A Toskovat feels like a scene from a film you are not sure you were meant to watch. Cold metallic air, smoke, wax, and a gourmand sweetness that always arrives with a shadow behind it. These are conceptual extraits for people who want a fragrance to say something, and the projection tends to match the intensity of the idea.
- Origin
- Bucharest, Romania
- Founded
- 2022
- Known for
- Conceptual extraits, Inexcusable Evil
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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