Attaquer le Soleil is a Rorschach test. Believe me, come in close to someone wearing this frag and you WILL have a reaction. It’s a labdanum bomb, the resin from the cistus plant, which in Spring erupts into papery white flowers with sunshine yellow stamen. Cute, right? No bitch: labdanum oil is leathery, musky, and sweet in a way that feels nasty. You know how barf is sweet? Dust bunnies? Garbage warming on the street in July? Don’t worry, Attaquer doesn’t smell like those things, it’s more like a… crevice. It’s skin and fresh sweat and bodily residue. It’s not fecal but it insists upon an acknowledgement of the body’s lower half. If I’m being real it smells like a rim job. Not an antiseptically douched shrink-wrapped rim job, and not a two-days-since-a-bath “I wasn’t expecting company,” rim job. This is a rim job that showered before the date, got tipsy off two mezcal sodas, and asks “your place or mine?” It’s clean but human. Do you like that smell? Attaquer is a brilliant perfume because it forces you to get real: What excites you? What are you ashamed of, or afraid of? If a Mary Gaitskill novella were a fragrance, this would be it.
The idea of a perfume that smells like old library books is a bit of a unicorn for fragheads: it makes them horny as HELL. That dusty, musty, saccharine, dried salvia thing? If you can’t remember just trust me: right now my nose is buried in a 40 year old Joyce Carol Oates novel discarded from the LAPL, and she is ripe! Attaquer has that stuffy, card-catalog smell but it also smells like the library itself, think wood panels and pencil shavings. This isn’t a 70s library with linoleum desks, it has gravitas, like the Bryant Park library in New York. Actually, that feels too grand, too public; this is a perfume that operates in the dark, behind closed doors. It’s more like the scent of a private study built with the oldest money you’ve ever smelled: encyclopedic volumes stacked to the ceiling, tweed blazer draped over the desk chair, fountain pen, and windows that have been painted shut for 80 years. The door is always locked, except when it’s not, but don’t you even think about setting foot in there without permission. It’s not allowed and you might get punished :)
Etat Libre d’Orange famously makes a perfume called Secretions Magnifiques designed to smell like semen, which has a sweetness that operates in the same way as Attaquer, except with an iron note that smells like clean, fresh blood. There’s also something about Secretions that recalls a 90s Calvin Klein aquatic, maybe ozone? A metallic cucumber melon accord? It goes there! But Attaquer makes Secretions feel like child’s play. It’s a scent inspired by Marquis de Sade and I love that it’s so linear, so natural smelling, so essential, but still somehow so perverted. Sort of like sex itself.
If I’m making Attaquer le Soleil sound schizophrenic that’s because this fragrance treats you like an adult and adult life isn’t so simple! It’s currently my favorite perfume to reach for and I wear it almost every single day; I even insisted my two besties buy it because I simply want it around me all the time. Intrigued? Just go for it. I’d recommend this fragrance to anyone really, whether you enjoy the smell of burying your nose in a book, or the smell of burying it into something else 🍑
Love this description as a crevice. A little more polite than a crack but not by too much. If you like SM, you might like Eris' Belle du Jour (I seem to recall it's the same nose). It's a more approachable version.
You are really something else. I’m reading you and Hillary Leichter right now, and I’m so pleased.