If you’ve had the pleasure of sipping champagne with perfumer Alessandro Gualtieri, then you know that Nasomatto, his luxury fragrance company, is aptly named. Loosely translated from the Italian, Nasomatto means “crazy nose” – and as a nose, Gualtieri is well-known in the industry, not only for his acumen but also for his manic joie de vivre.
As Gualtieri states, “l begin to make something but at a certain point, it starts making choices by itself. It is the process that interests and guides me. I like the feeling of losing control and I’m no longer the one making the choices.”
©Nasomatto
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Nasomatto’s Hindu Grass evokes that delicious sensation of sliding under the influence of something beyond your control. A green patchouli fragrance, Hindu Grass recreates those halcyon days of adolescence when a spring meadow in bloom commingled with the scents of tobacco and hashish – and time expanded indefinitely. Think back to summer afternoons in an urban park, stretched flat on the grass, gazing at the shape-shifting clouds.
The perfume’s sharp opening is like inhaling a resinous pipe in a shaft of sunlight inside a barn stacked with hay. From here, the fragrance melts into a fresh creamy cloud redolent of sweetgrass mixed with hemp and a whiff of oud.
“My involvement is to create something that is alive and will be able to say new things,” says Gualtieri. “I want my perfumes to have an intelligence of their own, not just be slaves to my meaning.”
©Avery Perfume Gallery
One of the pleasures of Hindu Grass is the manner in which it evolves according to memory. There’s a smoky herbaceous warmth in Nasomatto’s patchouli that makes it less Haight-Ashbury hashish and incense in the Sixties and more like a South of Market chypre in 2016. More refined and focused, this is a fragrance less inclined to be confrontational and more likely to coalesce. Hindu Grass unfolds like a memory of San Francisco: the City still enchants with its narcotic charms and yet now the verdant green is vetiver with a hint of amber.
The Amsterdam-based Nasomatto is available at Avery Perfume Gallery in New Orleans, as well as Neiman Marcus.
