The Wayamaya Effect: Sex and the Sea Neroli

You start your foray into fragrance. You start with the Givenchys or the Guerlains and move into the Diptyques and the Lutenses. Okay, so you smell good, but what’s next? Your favorite picks start to lose their appeal.

Of course, they’re enchanting, notably timeless, and some of my absolute favorites but something is missing. Depth, quirks, spiritedness…funk?

Here’s where Francesca Bianchi comes in. She quite a reputation in the world of fragrance. Those who love her scents are obsessed with them and those who dislike them write equally as much about them. Most of the hype surrounding her work is because of her use of animalic notes. I've always been intrigued by musks and how pheromones can help us to find divine union. Our skin smells different to each person because of our unconscious chemistry and it's a wonderful technology we were born with. So of course, when I came across her work, I was immediately drawn to it.

Her website describes her love for perfumery as art and creating fragrances that birth an experience from within. Her philosophy speaks to me heavily as a mystic trying to fight the false new age narratives of denying your humanity. There is so much focus on exploring worlds outside ourselves, when what is truly needed (in our ever evolving materialist culture) is journeying the map of our soul. Scent is an extraordinary way to both regulate the nervous system and create a holy space (ex. the incense within the ancient Egyptian culture).

To be honest, when I received my samples in the mail, I was nervous. I sat down in the wooden chair at my vanity in my small childhood bedroom with little to no ventilation besides a cracked window, and pressed I down on the atomizer of Sex and the Sea Neroli as gently as I could.

Oh… oh, this is so good.

Sex and the Sea Neroli is a golden nectar that melts into everything it caresses like the Midas touch. The notes (from FB website): Bergamot, Petit-Grain, Honey, Neroli, mimosa, coconut, immortelle, rose, iris, sandalwood, Vetiver, labdanum, benjoin, ambergris, civet, vanilla.

Upon first spray the neroli greets you. It’s sharp, it’s a bit jarring, somewhat vinegar-y, and narcotic. The florals and sandalwood are out in full force (I do believe sandalwood is what carries that savory, dill aroma). Of course, the civet’s in there too. It's not urinous, fecal, or sour. It anchors the fleeting fairies of florals and brings them down to Earth. When combined they have an effect reminiscent of the first sip of a cold seltzer or a steaming, salty broth: you need more, and you need it now.

This fragrance is so well-blended that I couldn’t pick out everything that’s listed if I tried. It’s a cloud of heady, halcyon glue that makes you swoon. It hits you and you’ve lost your attachment to your surroundings, like falling asleep at the beach.

Past the opening notes, it dries down quickly into a waxy, pasty, balmy body oil. You’ve covered yourself in raw coconut oil and rolled around in the wet sand for a few hours, soaking up the earth and her minerals. What she has, you lack. She nourishes you until you become whole again. Beginning now is the Wayamaya effect (thank you, Lana).

Coconut fragrances can get a bad rap for being just sunscreen, I however, love the sunscreen notes. Anyways, it’s not much present here, nowhere near Beach Walk by Maison Margiela.

This coconut note leads you on a shamanistic journey. You’re visited by this pulsating urge to scale the coastlines and canoodle with surfer boys.

To be scooped up in their van between surf boards and wet suits, and shown to their secret cove. You’re the spirit of adventure, floating as one with the salty water with zinc on your face. You wash ashore and pick driftwood out of your hair, sand out of your bikini bottom, and melting ice cream out of your tote bag. You share peaches and pineapples, recalling the video of Rihanna soaking her mango in the sea. This man you're with is familiar, he’s an extension of this location, this experience, a facet of mother earth created in the country of your spirit.

This stage lasts a few hours but feels endless. It’s euphoric and hypnotic. It is sex, just not in the modernist sense. It’s expansive, personal, deeply spiritual, and borderline ritualistic.

In its continuing stages, the sweetness returns. The vanilla and benzoin creep in. It’s quiet when you want to smell it but appears out of nowhere like a reminder of those hazy summer memories. When you catch its essence once more, your vessel swells like waves and warm sugar crystallizes in your chest.

Sex and the Sea Neroli becomes a second skin, an impulse within you. Something akin to the dark and divine. The natural feminine polarity and its innate, ancient medicine. Uplifting, life giving, and so you. But not unlike the sacred waters you grew in. Life arises from the void and swirls until its materialized.

Dancing in liminality until the end of time, you, your love, and your sun birthed creation.

I experienced this for the first time in the cold and bleak days of northeastern January. I cannot imagine how enveloping it’ll be in the summer. It lasts forever on skin, although I wish it was even stronger! It is sweaty, funky, and a bit too close to a woman’s natural skin smell, but I love it. Francesca Bianchi makes perfumes for those who want the full experience and I want to experience them in their entirety.

I also bought a sample of Angel’s Dust, and a review may lie in its future.

Samples were bought from IndigoPerfumery, but Francesca Bianchi’s website has many different beautifully curated sample packs for you to try out (including a full discovery set). I cannot wait to try more of her creations one day.

If you’re Venusian (Libra, Taurus) or Neptunian (Pisces), you’d love this.

Want me to review one of your perfumes? Contact me.