Description
An exciting new fragrance making its debut at the Elements Showcase is a collaboration between hip Brooklyn pop-up retailer BKLYN Dry Goods and rising niche perfume stars D.S. & Durga.
Spent Musket Oil is an aggresive and masculine mix that features notes of leather, birchwood, tobacco, anise and spent rifle oil. The fragrance was inspired by the scented hang tags created by the company to use at their BKLYN Dry Goods retail events, and the packaging offers a simple and rugged visual aesthetic in line with the vintage men’s clothing that is their stock in trade.
Spent Musket Oil was launched in 2012. The nose behind this fragrance is David Seth Moltz.
ruassi – :
absolutely birch tar at its best. stunning balance and complexity with mostly very heavy notes, reminds me of lonestar memories but with more going on. shame it’s such a limited release! excellent stuff
Meencecaw – :
I may not have a musket to compare it to but this smells exactly – and I mean exactly – like my first car.
I had an extremely used 79 Camaro that I managed to buy for $750. It was brown and ugly and loud and awesome.
The leather from the ceiling of the car had gotten loose and would sometimes flop down on my head unexpectedly while I was driving. I had to keep a staple gun in the car for repairs on the fly.
The guy who sold me the car was an elderly man who didn’t speak much. He had smoked pipes in there for twenty years before selling it to me for pennies and moving back to his home in Germany.
The tobacco smell was deep in the upholstery, in the dashboard… in the radio; it would cling to my clothes and my skin and I’d take it with me when I stepped out of the car. The paint on the body was peeling and if I’d run my hand across the hood or the door my fingers would smell like metal for hours.
One of those scented foam pine trees dangled from the rear view mirror; I let it stay. There was a sheds-worth of rusty garden tools in the trunk that I never could bring myself to remove, even to use. And there was also a smell like lawnmower fluid that would drift up every once in a while from somewhere deep in the guts of the car.
My wife says this stuff plain stinks. It reminds her of the scented wreaths and stick brooms at hobby stores. But I think it smells amazing. To me it smells like 17. It smells like 90 miles per hour on a closed-off farm road. It smells like highschool dates and late late nights, like the ghosts of an old secretive man. It smells like that Camaro. Damn, if it don’t smell exactly like that old brown Camaro.
qweasttgxwheyar – :
Spent Musket Oil
Collaboration DS & Durga / BKLYN Dry Goods
Spent Musket Oil is a unique limited edition collaboration between New York Retailer BKLYN Dry Goods and rising niche perfume stars DS & Durga. BKLYN dry goods, co founded by Jahn Hall and Kurt Uhlendorf is a online and pop up mens apparel retailer specialising in vintage American fashion. The brand was born and bred by an insatiable curiosity and love of vintage. Tightly merchandised clothing, objects and curiosities sold on the site are a thoughtfully executed range of quality vintage offered at extremely fair prices. Inspiration for the fragrance was drawn from scented swing tags the company designed and created for their pop up store events in New York city and throughout the country.
An introduction between the two collaborators was made by Ulrich Lang, co creator of the Elements Showcase niche perfume exhibition when he chance discovered the scented tags at one of the brands early pop up event. Spent Musket Oil being a more grown up and polished version of the original swing tag aroma, is a standout first fragrance for the dry goods retailer. Its bottle beautifully customised in bound leather cord and stainless navy style dog tags, stamped with BKLYN branding and the fragrance name, housed in a draw string bag with notes listed and spunky navy iconography. This is what hooked me line and sinker. I adore the packaging. The overall look and execution of the product is done with quality and a inspired design aesthetic.
Spent Musket Oil has been described by is creators as aggressive and masculine, it’s accords include dried leather hilt, vintage birch wood, cavendish tabac, anise, spent rifle oil and musk. The opening of this fragrance is original and fitting to its name, calling to mind tarry black leather and the gun smoke that lingers from a freshly fired rifle. The anise is bitter sweet to start giving the introduction a sharp resinous aroma that adds a sticky liquorice like undertone to the leather rendering it polished to a high shine finish , not unlike buffed military boots with the smell of fresh boot polish warmed by friction and heat. The first shot is aggressive and tarry, only to promptly sweeten as the anise cuts through the birch wood, clearing the smoke and balancing out the bitterness which I have grown most fond of through repeated wearings.
Hastily the fragrance seems to rearrange itself into a rustic combination of rich dense pipe tobacco, sweetened chewy liquorice with herbal clove like nuances and spent rifle oil that give a synthetic industrial cleaning product aroma .The overtone is masculine and militant, playing up the rawness of its ingredient to deliver a fragrance that is relevant to the brands image and customer. Button up Flannelette shirts, multi pocketed utility vests and belted army pants tucked into distressed leather boots available on the brands online store suggest this fragrance is targeted towards a rugged outdoors type of man, or the trendy inner city urbanite. He smells of tool boxes and garage grease, packing rolled tobacco pouches and aniseed throat lozenges. Fashion forward in carefully selected vintage statement pieces.
I find it near impossible to suggest a fragrance it reminds me of or is similar to, the closest i can articulate is Spent Musket Oil evocative fragrance is similar to the combined smell of a army disposal store, conjuring memories of rubber soles with leather uppers over well oiled rifles and hunting accessories . The fragrance life is fair, flaring then fleeting sums it up. It grows softer and sweeter over the first few hours of wear presenting a moderate sillage for up to 3 hours. I feel the unfussy selection of ingredients deems this fragrance some what linear after the sting of the bullet has faded. With the birch wood charing the leather with a smoky character, it leaves minimal depth on the skin in the dry down. To me the fragrance life mimics the result of a fired gun , initially loud and ear piercing when the trigger is pulled, then into a descending echo, everything unfolding quickly. This is where I feel the fragrance falls short . The dry down is missing something to anchor the it long term, more woods perhaps or some dirty patchouli could have stretched out this fragrance giving it more longevity and depth in the final stages of development. This I’m willing to over look in what is a brave and daring fragrance for both brands responsible for its creation.