PLAYALINDA EAU DE PARFUM

“This fragrance has a transient quality. It’s got soft spots, while the edges are extremely luminous […] There’s a lot of fresh air flowing right through this fragrance, and built right into it. It’s almost as if Carter has caught […] breezes performing a vanishing act. And that’s not because this is weak on performance. Instead, it’s actually part of its magic.”
— TJ Norris, Notetaking

A PERFUME ABOUT MEMORY

The real Playalinda is a nude beach sat on immaculate and pristine land's end. Among its many charms is a paradox: it is so untouched by modern development, yet so close to some of the most advanced technology on earth—rocket launchpads—that it seems to exist independent of time.

The day you'll encounter in Playalinda is dreamy, witnessed through the haze of memory, and accompanied by a lover. It leads with hyperrealistic, sun-warmed peach rendered through generous doses of osmanthus and full-bodied jasmine sambac. Also featured is the dirty-hair aspect of ambrette seed undergirded by familiar, grounding patchouli and vetiver. A gentle touch of sulfuric white grapefruit affords the composition a deeply human smell of skin bronzed and kissed with sweat under the day's hot sun.

And it's in Playalinda's musty base full of smoke and scents associated with the corporeal body that we find our lover in their full flesh. There's the fishy brine of fresh seaweed washing ashore, the narcotic siren song of pure indole, and the inky heft of oakmoss. A live copper wire, like the taste of coins, animates their presence. And finally, the glorious yet underutilized choya nakh, made from crushed and toasted seashells, reinforces Playalinda's dreamy memoryscape by the sea.

“I have been derailed by Playalinda […]

I adore when a fragrance acts like this. […] For me it is nostalgia—the pain of it, the memory of optimism and disappointment […] it’s so delightful and strange […] like real exquisite sadness.”  
— Fragrantica User @sophiecaller

An eau de parfum at 17% concentration, Playalinda contains several rarer natural materials and is therefore priced slightly higher than my other offerings. But its deliberate and controlled ebbs and flows are nothing if not thought-provoking. Playalinda actively confronts tired tropes and limitations of the fruity floral and aquatic genres and interrogates the means by which bodies are evoked in perfume. 

Better still, Playalinda asks questions about the trustworthiness of memory. Once someone lives purely in memory, independent of time, can we trust what we remember of them? I don't have an answer to this question. But the sea might. 

*A VEGAN OPTION OF THIS PERFUME IS AVAILABLE FOR A 15% SURCHARGE.

”Playalinda is the [perfume by Chronotope] I enjoy the most. Not because it is the easiest but because it is the best constructed. It also looks, unflinchingly so, at the scent of sweaty sex on a beach […with] an abstract accord of slick skinned copulation […] It is sensual in its effect while also evoking the bodily fluids from the sexual act. It can create its own mood.
—Mark Benhke, Colognoisseur