Cucurrucucú Eau de Parfum

The story of Cucurrucucú has some layers, the first of which is that I made it for my best friend to wear at his wedding, which took place on April Fool’s Day 2022. He suggested many of the perfume’s notes, particularly the ink accord, and I picked out its name from a campy midcentury mariachi huapango wherein the singer coos the call of a mourning dove and laments losing the love of his life to someone else. The name, then, was my way of acknowledging that his wedding signified the formal end to a then-longstanding joke we’d often made about marrying each other for tax bennies—and that he wore a mariachi suit to the ceremony only made the name fit even better.

Beyond that context, another layer is that the key material in Cucurrucucú is one that isn’t supposed to exist—copal essential oil. but does. shouldn’t even exist.