Description

“I am the kind of perfume lover that likes to be challenged from time to time. To get acquainted with rare perfumes that take time and dedication to fully know and appreciate. Those fragrances with which, when you smell them for the first time, you can’t decide if you are attracted or repelled. Or even better, both. These are the ones that come closer to works of art. And there are days one feels open to be questioned, days when you want an intellectual task for the day; to decode that scent. To tame it and make it yours. To embrace the beast.

Nikolay Eremin is an independent Russian perfumer who is still under the radar for most fragrance enthusiasts, but he has launched quite an impressive number of scents and after analyzing samples from almost every perfume in the collection, I think I have come to understand his preferences and the main core of his creations in the Nimere line. He is one of those perfumers who likes each scent to evolve from a common structure and his preference for certain materials like tuberose, leather, animalics, smoke and incense is notorious. A note of tar, coming from birch or cade, is found in most of Nimere’s fagrances and this one is no exception. Somehow, it’s as if the perfumer is always trying to find out the perfect use of smoke and leather and in this case it’s perfected to the maximum.

Nimere by Nimere XVI may be scary for a lot of people. It’s a beast in every sense of the work. It smells like animals and smoke and booze, yes. It’s incredibly feral and furry. It’s also sweet. But it is also a bomb of great magnitude. So this is a fragrance you have to be very careful with. One spray is the dose. One. Well, two if you are going out and you feel daring. But never more or you’ll hate it. It’s also a fragrance that you don’t want to smell directly from skin to nose. The sampling of it should not be done in the traditional way of spraying it on the wrist and smelling it with your nose on the skin. It needs space between surface and nose. It needs to be aerated, like wine sometimes does. Spray it on your neck and let it come to your nose in whiffs. The mix of the fragrant molecules and the air and the small journey from skin to nose benefits this concentrated juice and makes this a very pleasant experience. There are other magnificent scents that work like this. I can recall Zoologist’s Bat or the vintage Balenciaga’s Rumba, for example.

Ok, so I’m done with all the introductions, instructions and warnings for the correct use of this perfume. Now what do I smell in it? I smell passion, courage and strength, but let’s be more precise. Castoreum, civet, smoke, leather and liquor play the main roles in this scent. In fact, this is really heavy on castoreum, a material that is so concentrated here that you can almost taste it. It fuses with the leathery and tarry aspect of birch to make a burnt leather accord. An interesting feature is the way that these materials play with a prominent cherry note that brings out the sweetness of the perfume. At this point it makes me think of chocolate, some dark kind of oozing hot chocolate. It also makes me think of a famous bonbon: Mon Chéri.

The gourmand aspect of the scent is reinforced by the presence of cognac which imparts strength and additional sweet notes. But what could turn into a sweet perfume is prevented by the injection of artemisia, which pushes it back to bitterness, imparts a slight touch of green and makes a bridge to cypriol.

Dirty, dark, nocturnal, smoky, dense and finally warm in the drydown. Nimere by Nimere XVI is all of this and more, and it can even turn gloomy if you are not in the mood for it. But it’s a sensual, voluptuous journey into the pleasures of obscure animalic perfumes. It has everything I can ask for: leather, civet, castoreum, costus (which is not prominent but I know it makes subliminal wonders), even hyrax to bring that honeyed animalic grease. There are no flowers here and sometimes I feel the lack of some. But I respect the proposal of Nicolay Eremin in this fragrance as a well orchestrated experience of depth, seduction, darkness and mystery which is both wild and elegant, and absolutely not for everyday or everyone.” – Review by Miguel Matos.

Nimere’ by Nimere’ XVI was launched in 2016.