Zoologist
Squid
The Story
Céline Barel took the squid and built it on an ambergris accord, a salty accord and a black ink accord. Both the ambergris and the musk are synthetic, and Squid uses no animal products.
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.
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.
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.
Salty
mineral brine on bare skin
A mineral, briny tang that reads like sun-warmed skin after a swim or the crust of dried sea spray. It adds a moreish, almost edible savoriness, intimate and bare, hovering between flesh and ocean.
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.
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.
Incense
The smell of resin hitting hot coal
What it is
What you are smelling is a change of state: resin meeting heat. The resin is usually olibanum, wept by Boswellia trees in Oman and the Horn of Africa, and perfumers round the effect out with labdanum and styrax.
How it smells
Cool and dry to begin with, sharp enough to read as turpentine, then the smoke arrives: peppery, ashen, faintly sweet. There is a stone-church quality to it, soapy and faintly green, and it stays close to the skin.
In perfumery
It works the way silence works in a room. From the heart into the base it cools florals, sharpens woods and drops a weight of ritual into oriental and chypre structures that would otherwise read as merely rich.
Good to know
Long before anyone wore it, this smoke was among antiquity's costliest imports. It moved along the Arabian caravan roads to temples around the Mediterranean, where burning it was the point: the scent was the offering.
Solar Salicylate
The synthetic breath of clover and orchid
What it is
One of the salicylates, a family of synthetics that walked into perfumery in the late nineteenth century and never left. Amyl salicylate is built from salicylic acid and amyl alcohol, and it has been softening florals ever since.
How it smells
Green and gently sweet, with a balsamic warmth. The signature is clover leaning toward orchid, plus a faint unripe banana. Diffusive but quiet, it blurs the sharp edges of a blend rather than announcing itself, and it stays.
In perfumery
If a carnation, hyacinth or jasmine accord feels rounded rather than shrill, this is often why. It cushions tropical florals, fills out fougeres and soapy bases, and lends the powdery glow that keeps them from thinning out.
Good to know
Sun cream is the giveaway. That creamy warmth is half the memory of twentieth-century soap and talc, and this molecule did much of the work, which is why so many old powders share one comfortable, slightly blurred smell.
Pink Pepper
Bright rosy berries with a spice fizz
What it is
It is not pepper. The rose-colored berries come from a South American tree with no botanical link to the pepper vine at all, dried and then steam-distilled or extracted with CO2.
How it smells
Rosier and fruitier than black pepper, with only a prickle of heat. Crushed berries, a juniper-ish resin, a flick of citrus. It flashes on the opening and is gone quickly, leaving a gentle warm spiciness behind.
In perfumery
Perfumers reach for it when a composition needs spice without heat. It puts a rosy fizz over florals, freshens woods and ambers, and sits well with bergamot and patchouli. The fizz is a signature of the modern fruity-floral.
Good to know
The family it actually belongs to is the cashews, close enough that people who react to cashew or mango sometimes react to these berries too. Worth knowing before you cook with them.
Black Ink Accord
Wet writing and cold metal on paper
What it is
No one extracts anything from an inkwell. The note is assembled, a few naturals under a stack of synthetics, to suggest India ink, iron-gall writing fluid and paper left somewhere damp. In Squid it sits in the heart, beside a salty accord and opoponax.
How it smells
Cool, dark and mineral, with a sooty metallic edge over damp paper. Camphor smoke at the top, a dry patchouli-like earth beneath, a green-bitter prickle across it. Shadowy rather than sweet.
In perfumery
It sits at the top and into the heart, a cold intellectual hook set against woods, leather and earth. Because there is no standard formula, every house builds the effect its own way.
Good to know
What reads as metal is not metal. Iron has no smell; the tang comes from 1-octen-3-one, formed when iron meets the oils on your skin. Blood and old fountain pens smell of you, not of the metal.
Salty Accord
Sea air on skin, entirely invented
What it is
Put salt under your nose and nothing happens: sodium chloride has no smell at all. The note is a trick, assembled from ambroxan, airy musks and a few marine molecules until your brain agrees that it is brine. In Squid, salicylates used in large amounts carry the salt.
How it smells
Clean, dry and faintly saline, with a cool lift and a sun-warmed glow underneath. Nothing fishy about it. Think dried spray on warm forearms after a day at the water, closer to skin than to sea.
In perfumery
It sits from heart to base as a weightless mineral hum, and the whole salty-skin genre is built on it. Sage, musk, ambergris and aquatic notes give it edges to catch on.
Good to know
Salt-skin scents barely existed before the twenty-tens. Ambroxan made dry mineral warmth the signature of the decade and the beach followed it into the bottle, so what you are smelling is a very recent idea.
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.
Ambergris
Warm salt skin built without the whale
What it is
In this perfume the ambergris is an accord, not the real material: a blend built around Ambroxan-type molecules. They echo the warm, salty, skin-like glow of aged ambergris, and perfumers often round them out with labdanum and a dry, mineral edge.
How it smells
Warm, salty and skin-like, closer to a glow than to a smell. Driftwood and tobacco run through it with a mineral sweetness, and it never turns faecal the way raw ambergris can. Up close it can seem faint; a step away it fills the air.
In perfumery
An accord that buys radiance and hold, slowing the evaporation of everything lighter above it. Labdanum, incense, leather, woods and musks all take it, and it gives many modern ambers their salty, breathing quality.
Good to know
Ambroxan, the workhorse of these accords, has never been near a whale. It is usually made from sclareol, a compound from clary sage, and it is one of the molecules that forms naturally as real ambergris cures in sun and seawater.
Benzoin
Warm vanilla balsam wept from a tapped tree
What it is
Benzoin does not flow on its own. Someone cuts the bark of a styrax tree in Laos, Vietnam or Sumatra, and the wound weeps a gum that hardens over months into reddish tears.
How it smells
Sweet, warm, unmistakably vanillic, with a powdery amber softness underneath. Siam benzoin is rounder and creamier; Sumatra runs smokier, with a cinnamon bite. Left on skin it turns almost caramelized.
In perfumery
A base note that behaves like a fixative and a sweetener at once, giving amber accords their glow and holding the rest of the composition still. It softens sharp edges beside labdanum, tonka and incense.
Good to know
The word benzene comes from here. Chemists named benzoic acid after this resin, and benzene took its name from the acid. The resin's own name is a worn-down Arabic phrase, luban jawi, frankincense of Java.
Musk
Clean synthetic musk, soft as warm skin
What it is
In this perfume the musk is synthetic: modern musk molecules rather than any animal material. The family is wide, from clean, sweet Galaxolide to the macrocyclic musks, and it is the backbone of modern perfumery, chosen for softness, consistency and staying power.
How it smells
Clean, soft and quietly warm: hot-ironed linen, fresh cotton, skin rather than fur. Some musks lean sweet and faintly fruity, others powdery, but all share a smooth, rounded warmth that settles close to the skin and stays there.
In perfumery
Musk is the floor a composition stands on: it fixes what sits above, stretches the wear and adds that second-skin glow. Synthetic musks do this with great consistency from batch to batch, softening sharp edges and carrying a scent well into its drydown.
Good to know
The first synthetic musk was found by chance: in 1888 the chemist Albert Baur, working on explosives, noticed that one of his compounds smelled of musk. The musks perfumers use today are later, refined generations, chosen for their softness and how well they last.
Fragrance Character
Incense and solar salicylate frame the central black ink accord, sweet and cloudy, with a faintly antiseptic, mineral clarity. The salty accord keeps the heart cool and wet while opoponax begins pulling everything toward warmth. On the drydown, benzoin and the ambergris accord take over completely, the oceanic edge softened into a dense, animalic synthetic musk that sits close to skin.
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
Best in the long drift between late autumn and early spring, worn at night when the air is cold enough to sharpen the salt and let the resins open slowly.
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The Vibe
The Nose
Céline Barel
Perfumer
Céline Barel grew up in Grasse, joined IFF and trained at the company's own perfumery school, at its centres in the Netherlands, New York, Paris and Grasse. Her fragrances include Aesop Tacit, Aesop Aurner, Zoologist Squid and Maison d'Etto Durban Jane.
The Maison
A bestiary in extrait. Civilised doses of untamed animals.
Zoologist does not make perfumes so much as it makes creatures. Each release is a portrait of a single animal, handed to a perfumer, independent or at one of the big fragrance companies, and told to be fearless, and the results tend to divide a room in the best way. These are scents with weather and mood, worn as a story rather than as a background.
- Origin
- Toronto, Canada
- Founded
- 2013
- Known for
- Squid, Tyrannosaurus Rex
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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