A tribute to the ancient African blackwood and its majestic home.
From the crackling lymph to the balsamic resin. From smoked wood to the stone burned by the sun. From purple twilight to black night like ink. Grenadille d'Afrique expresses not only the homonymous tree, but also the primordial landscape in which it grows.
"It is a surprising perfume, without compromise and exciting," explains the perfumer Alberto Morillas. “The materials are simple, bare and unadorned. It is through this density and simplicity that the fragrance turns into art. "
It starts with the African Blackwood tree, a rare and expensive member of the Family of Rosewood whose Latin name, Dalbergia Melanobylon, translates into "black wood". The title denies the range of its wood, which goes from intense purple to brownish black and is also known as Grenadilla. The ancient Egyptians, who called him H'Bny, obtained precious furniture from his manner. In Tanzania, the people Makonde, who know him as Mpingo, uses him to create spectacular and precious engravings on the tree of life.
In Gannadille d'Afrique in 2016, Alberto Morillas transforms him into an olfactory sculpture of surprising elegance. Route from the twigs to the roots with an aromatic lymph with a juniper scent, the legendary African blackwood tree is built around a Haitian vetiver "trunk". With its complex facets of wood, smoke, earth and flint, it is the vertical axis that draws the vegetable, animal and mineral notes of the fragrance together.
In the first breath, it is difficult to say if the perfume places you at sunset or at dawn. The sparkling bergamot captures the last rays of the sun, while a purple haze of lavender and Viola pours their dusty lunar light on the savannah prairies. Further on in his life, vanilla, transformed into fuel resin by a lash of Cisto ladano amber, emanates a balsamic heat. The bleached wood, the cortex soft like the skin and the stone heated by the sun release the heat of the day in the black night like the ink, refresh from a breeze of moss.
Aedes de Venustas Grenadille d'Afrique has now been carefully transferred to a new precious ship: a grooved glass bottle characterized by peacock accents, a matte black cap with impressed coats of arms and an elegant but heavy design that marks the next chapter of the line Aedes. History of De Venustas.
Morillas describes his creation as "fossil wood rubbed with a vanilla agreement", a strongly contrasted composition that highlights his dark heart with bright notes. Grenadille d'Afrique explores a new region on the map of perfumes, where woods and resins meet ink and stone.
