Niche Perfumery

The Smells of Japan by Kusado

09/26/07 13:57:43

Those that love nature and enjoy in its beauty, have for sure secured a special place in their hearts for the sorceress night. In the night everything is irrational, as if someone has bring life into the things that were just until few moments ago standing or laying still and motionless, being just an ordinary, usual stuff. The night can make you feel that everything around you is breathing, especially when you are all alone, on an island, at the end of the world, and especially when you are a Japanese and a graduate from the art academy in Tokyo...

An unforgettable night sight in the island of Hokkaido has inspired Midori Yto to repeat it in a perfume. Midori was enchanted by the sight of bamboo on the moonlight. The moonlight shed its silver on the earth and changed the ambient – everything looked so magical and perfect. Midori shared her rapture with her French colleagues from Kusado Parfums International. She simply brought them to the same place one night. A week later an idea for a new fragrance was born. The new fragrance brand Kusado, a division of Castel Trade & Commerce, presented its first fragrance in 1997 – L'Eau de Kyoto, or The Water of Kyoto.

The fragrance was created in Paris, while the bottle, designed to be reminiscent of a willowy bamboo stalk and enclosed into a round outer box with bamboos in the moonlight painted on it, was created in Japan. This first fragrance of the Kusado house became its visiting card.

L'Eau de Kyoto is fresh and calm, refined and sophisticated, without any snobbery. Restrained in a Japanese way, this very intimate fragrance turns into the scent of your skin, distinctive and therefore appealing; it plays with its green freshness, thin spices and flower petals, warm sweetness of amber and sandal... L'Eau de Kyoto is a very much Japanese fragrance, it does not impose itself as a seducer, it does not rush to cool you instantly in a hot summer day, the idea behind it is to show you a beauty of a Japanese night.

The mystery of Kusado continues in the second fragrance of the house, launched four years after the first – Sensu. The idea behind the fragrance is a hand-fan, and the word 'sensu' means exactly that, apart from the association to the word 'sensual'. And yes, Sensu is sensual; its green grassy 'fan' is trying to dispel the slumber of a long warm evening, in which the big red Sun does not rush to plunge into the sea.

Sensu is versatile and unusual just like its predecessor, created on contrasts of fresh and warm: fresh notes of citrus, green leaves, and the sea, interlace with floral and woodsy accords. The fragrance is very picturesque and red, at the same watery fresh, just like a fan wave in an evening that falls over the sea.

A waft of a fan
Awakens my heart
Turn off the Sun