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A while ago, before I had in fact really gotten interested in perfume, I stumbled across Zoologist’s “Moth.” I got a sample of it because of the name and… it smelled like nothing at all to me. Generically nice. After I got into perfume I tried it again: same thing. Eventually I got so frustrated I dumped the entire sample on myself. But it still didn’t really smell like anything. Then this year I got a sample of “Moth” for my birthday, so I tried it again. And this time, in fact, I could smell a lot.
Zoologist is a line of perfumes that are each designed around specific animals. It’s run by Victor Wong, who works with individual perfumers on each concept, and is based in Toronto. The Zoologist line is pretty big and the full discovery set is expensive, so I picked a small number. I picked up the other perfumes done by Tomoo Inaba, the designer of “Moth,” (“Nightingale,” “Orchid Mantis”); one from Dawn Spencer Hurwitz of DSH (“Snowy Owl”); “King Cobra” because it’s the year of the snake; “Sloth” because I’d heard its designer, Prin Lomros (who also did “King Cobra”), is good; “Penguin” because I was hoping for gin; and “Dragonfly” and “Hummingbird” because they looked fun. When the package was finally released from customs it came with a complimentary sample (“Koala”).
I deliberately did not get the various Zoologist scents that are notorious for being weird or unpleasant or challenging, like “Squid” or “Tyrannosaurus Rex.” (Though “Moth” is kind of one of those.) I could not really tell you why. I think I wanted to pick perfumes I could interact with without a strong preexisting idea of how they smelled.