Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab is thrilled to present a series of scents based on Jim Jarmusch’s critically acclaimed film and soundtrack, ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE.
ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE tells the tale of two fragile and sensitive vampires, Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), who have been lovers for centuries. Both are cultured intellectuals with an all-embracing passion for music, literature and science, who have evolved to a level where they no longer kill for sustenance, but still retain their innate wildness.
Adam, a reclusive underground musician hiding out in the ruins of contemporary Detroit, despairs about human civilization’s decline, and worries about future survival. Eve, who is perhaps 3000 years old to Adam’s 500, takes a longer view of history and is more optimistic. She leaves her home in the ancient city of Tangier to come to his side.
As blood has been tainted by the zombies (humans), the formerly immortal Adam and Eve must secure uncontaminated blood from hospitals or they will perish. Eve’s close friend, Elizabethan dramatist and unacknowledged author of Shakespeare’s plays—Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), is now an elder vampire who provides Eve with hospital blood. Adam gets his supply from Dr. Watson (Jeffrey Wright), a skittish hematologist who provides safe blood at a price.
Adam and Eve’s precarious footing is further threatened by the uninvited arrival of Eve’s carefree and uncontrollable little sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska). Unlike Adam and Eve, Ava hasn’t yet learned to tame her wilder instincts, and her recklessness concerns Adam.
Driven by sensual photography, trance-like music, and droll humor, Jim Jarmusch’s ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE is a meditation on art, science, memory, and the mysteries of everlasting love.
Jim Jarmusch has long been considered a seminal figure in American independent cinema. His films are often noted for their transcendent minimalism and upturning of traditional genres such as the road movie, western, crime-film, and detective story. Born in Akron, Ohio, Jarmusch lives and works in New York.
Set against the romantic desolation of Detroit and Tangier, an underground musician, deeply depressed by the direction of human activities, reunites with his resilient and enigmatic lover. Their love story has already endured several centuries at least, but their debauched idyll is soon disrupted by her wild and uncontrollable younger sister. Can these wise but fragile outsiders continue to survive as the modern world collapses around them?
FULL SCENT/DESCRIPTION LIST
++ CHARACTER SCENTS
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Eve Perfume Oil
Add to cartEve is eternal: in three-thousand years, she has likely traveled the length and breadth of the world, immersed in innumerable cultures throughout the ages, observing the ebb and flow of humanity and the imperishability of nature itself. Despite her age, she is the character that seems most rooted, always experiencing each moment with open eyes, always fully present.
Her scent is one that travels through the eons: the Irish moss, yarrow, and hawthorn of the Iron Age Britons, ancient Rome’s omphacium and honey, myrrh and calamus from Egypt, the frankincense and damask roses of the Florentine Renaissance, white sandalwood from the Far East, Moroccan saffron and rose water, and a swirl of incense from the souks.
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Adam Perfume Oil
Add to cartAdam, our suicidally romantic scoundrel. His scent is a palette of somber colors, melancholy memories, and lupine, savage beauty: black leather, pale sandalwood, ambergris accord, and the memory of a long-lost Victorian fougère. His internal life seems to be reflected in his lair, so his perfume also possesses the scent of the wood of his guitars, the rosin from his violin bow, the musty wool of neglected Oriental carpets, the plastic, metal, and magnetic tape of his reel-to-reel, the dust that permeates everything.
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Kit Perfume Oil
Add to cartImmersed in his (eternal) life’s work, holding on to his memories, suffused with a love of life and literature, Kit’s scent is soft and dry as bone: Mysore sandalwood a tattered and patched 16th century waistcoat, inkstained, still scented with the marjoram and benzoin dry perfumes of his youth.
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Ava Perfume Oil
Add to cartIt’s always a bit weird with family. A scant two-hundred years old, there doesn’t seem to be anything that roots Ava to her past. Her scent is utterly contemporary, and, like her personality, it is impulsive, capricious, and dangerous. Voluptuous and brittle, lovely and toxic: sheer vanilla musk with tuberose, red mandarin, and the sweet poison of white almond.
++ STORY POINT SCENTS
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The Edge of Doom Perfume Oil
Add to cartLove alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.The night flight from Tangier: drops of spilled blood color the antiseptic, bland, plastic paleness of the fuselage, with violet leaf for longing, rosemary for reminiscences, and black opoponax for apprehension.
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Quintessence of Dust Perfume Oil
Add to cart“What a piece of work is a man!”
“What is this quintessence of dust?”The passing: beeswax and smoke, yellowed paper and well-worn leather books, droplets of spilled ink, faded incense, blood-tinged salty tears, and the metal of the knife that skewers that illiterate zombie philistine’s portrait.
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Spooky Action at a Distance Perfume Oil
Add to cart“When you separate an entwined particle and you move both parts away from the other, even at opposite ends of the universe, if you alter or affect one, the other will be identically altered or affected. Spooky.”
Instantaneous correlated action between entangled partners: rose-infused sandalwood with violet leaf, frankincense, geranium rose, and a spark of elemi.
++ SOUNDTRACK SCENTS
These scents were built to compliment the film’s music itself, now available for purchase courtesy of ATP Recordings.
A very limited run of 350 bottles have been created for each scent.