The creator of Toskovat doesn’t want you to wear his perfume. Specifically, Inexcusable Evil – a scent that incorporates notes of blood, bandages and burning flowers. “I actually despise the smell,” he tells Dazed, speaking from his creative hub in Romania. David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi is the Bucharest-based nose behind this small batch perfumery that’s drawn a surge of interest amid an increase in perfumes with creative, unusual and even disturbing accords. “If we lived in a greater world, there wouldn’t be a necessity for it to exist or to be remembered,” he says. Despite this, the scent is the brand’s bestseller by 3 times, and is currently sold out online.

The cult perfumery, which describes its products as a “portal to memory”, currently sells 13 fragrances with elaborate, storytelling scent profiles. Age of Innocence depicts the abrupt lack of youth via candy floss, a ‘metal screech’, rubber and gasoline. Anarchist A_, meanwhile, lists notes of ‘dirty dollars’, ‘bank cards’, ‘priest’s clothes’ and ‘snow’, here meaning cocaine. Released deliberately throughout the Christmas period, it was intended to critique consumerism and hustle culture. “It goals to portray our far departure from spirituality and community, towards money, stimulants and distractions,” Jipa-Slivinschi says.

Inexcusable Evil is a press release about modern-day warfare, a theme especially pertinent to Jipa-Slivinschi because of his lineage being each Russian and Ukrainian. “Sadly, war remains to be a reality in our present day, even when most of us are privileged enough to go about our days without pondering of it. Inexcusable Evil changes that – it doesn’t can help you ignore the horrors of war. It applies to at least one’s skin the trauma that has haunted our species since its dawn. It shows how fragile all the pieces is – our body, our buildings, our lives, and most disappointing of all – our morals.”

When developing the fragrance, Jipa-Slivinschi says he imagined a scent that will be so cold, so inorganic and so out of day-to-day life that it might trigger everybody who got here involved with it. To him, the outcome is a mixture of an open wound and a hospital smell and he truly believed he had created something so unnatural and sterile that nobody would give you the chance to search out enjoyment in it. “I appear to have failed in my endeavour,” he says. “I imagined Inexcusable Evil would turn into more of a talking piece, or an object that startles. Going by numbers, because it’s our bestseller by 3 times, I can only imagine I failed in portraying the true horror. If I had succeeded, people would avoid it, not be drawn to it. Or perhaps we are only moths and Inexcusable Evil is the flame.”

Before becoming a perfume maker, Jipa-Slivinschi was a filmmaker and he applies the identical philosophy to his scents. “To me, the most effective scripts were at all times those that made us feel deeply for his or her characters. Same with fragrances, I prefer to conjure emotion and memory moderately than likeability.” Yet he says the label isn’t about him sharing any political beliefs. “I’m more interested by offering a tool for introspection. I desired to bring out things and emotions you didn’t even know you had.” Jipa-Slivinschi says he’s found himself most intrigued by movies “that work as mirrors … That’s the important focus with Toskovat – showing you what you’ve kept bottled up.”

Below we asked him about creating a few of these obscure notes, formulating perfumes that bring people to tears, and his thoughts on the mainstream fragrance industry.

What’s the strategy of getting something to smell like, say, blood?

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: Only a few people realise that even notes like strawberry or pineapple are still stuff you’ve got to check and construct. Those might be just as difficult as making blood. Where it gets easier is once you do a note that someone historically has done before you, like strawberry, which is prevalent within the cosmetics industry. Then you definitely’ve got other people’s work which you could study, but when you ought to do something that there’s not much literature on, you actually must go deep into the chemistry and search each nature and aroma chemicals and take a look at to recreate that reality. Sometimes it really works just on instinct. But there are some accords I’m still working on after two years. It just goes to indicate that just about all the pieces in nature is said.

What have been your favourite comments about your work?

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: Someone in Hungary messaged me once they placed an order: ‘I’m only getting this because so many individuals are talking about it, but I’m sure it’s gonna be bullshit.’ That was the one order where I used to be tracking it greater than the client, probably – I couldn’t wait for his or her feedback, I used to be so excited.

Sooner or later after receiving it, they messaged me saying, ‘I got here with the worst intentions into this and I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised.’ They wrote about how they were transported to their childhood and, despite the fact that it wasn’t a nice memory, it was real – they felt like a toddler again, smelling the dirty banknotes their parents would give them to go to the convenience store. It’s stories like those which might be so much more special than when people say, ‘Oh it’s very nice’, or ‘It performs very well.’

Are there every other scents that you simply are because of release?

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: There’s a perfume that’s gonna come out called The Last Birthday Cake – it’s purported to smell like all of the cakes someone eats of their lifetime. So it starts as a baby, where you don’t have teeth and you simply drink milk, and it gets sweeter, it gets more gourmand after which it turns a bit boozy. After which finally once you’re old, once more you can’t eat the cake so you simply smell the candles and the smoke. I used to be showing this to a woman and he or she immediately began crying. She later went on to inform me that it was a perfume that reminded her of her late husband and that she’d been each searching and avoiding this smell for like 20 years. It was really emotional.

Talking about scents being personal, fragrances can smell very different based on who wears them, can’t they?

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: It isn’t nearly your skin. After we were starting out and I used to be formulating the batches, I wore the identical perfume over the course of a month and a half. Once in Bucharest, once in Paris, Milan, Dubai. So all of the variables were the identical, – me, the perfume was definitely the identical, it was just the difference in humidity, I suppose, and the climate. It was almost like 4 different perfumes. It’s incredible how much can affect it. Everybody’s gonna get a unique experience, it stays really, really personal.

You’re doing something radically different from mainstream, business fragrance – what do you consider that industry and the best way perfumes are marketed?

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: It’s funny how people can latch onto marketing a lot – if something says lemon, they really consider it’s lemon oil, and in the event that they say it’s a female fragrance and may’t be sprayed on a person. But I believe because [fragrance] has a lot history, it’s now over 150 years old, we just take it as a given, we don’t stop and give it some thought. After they discover a formula that works, they have a tendency to – like in film – make small variations on the identical recipe, since it’s been proven to work and easier to get investment and distribution. So there’s at all times going to be less risk and fewer creativity at the commercial level. But there’s nothing inherently bad about it, it’s just the best way every industry works, I believe.

With Inexcusable Evil, though, it’s interesting the way you’ve created this product that you simply don’t want people to have interaction with or buy.

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: This week I saw a TikTok by someone in the US and so they were happening about how nice it’s and the way much they love wearing it. And I used to be like, ‘Ah, she’s missing the purpose!’ After which one other one where a reviewer – that one was actually quite funny because the individual that was using it was interpreting it as an old age form of castle smell. And that gave me a complete latest perspective. I went and tried it myself and tried to do some mental gymnastics to be transported to the identical place where he was.

What else are you working on?

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: I desired to make something that was intrinsically Romanian, and there’s one I’m working on – there’s a selected smell within the Moldova region throughout the summertime. We’ve spectacular medieval churches which were hand-painted, and when the sun hits that actually old paint and mixes with the incense and the character around it, since it’s really green and luxurious, it gives a positive and calming smell. It’s not incense like in Anarchist A_ where it’s imposing, heavy and you are feeling intimidated by a giant cathedral. It’s so much more intimate and so much more optimistic, which is something I feel like is lacking from Toskovat. I’m trying my best to make more optimistic stuff while staying true to myself.