Who: Leo Crabtree, creative director of niche fragrance brand BeauFort London. Thoughtful and quietly articulate, Leo’s description of his new Come Hell Or High Water range of intensely atmospheric fragrances had us totally captivated. All three scents are rich with drama and have a grown-up ‘Boys Own’ feel to them, evoking the wistful longing of adventure on the high seas. They are heady inhales of robustly seductive ingredients, including smokey woods, rum, spice, salty breezes, ink, dusty books, sticky tar and sea-worthy intrigue.
“Today I’m Wearing 1805 Tonnerre, by BeauFort London, because I needed something bracing (we caught Leo before he presented his range to the perfume press). It is a glorious celebration of something that was really unpleasant and brutal, the Battle of Trafalgar, but there’s a beauty in its darkness. It conjures up thunder, canons, gunpowder and blood. It uses a lot of birch tar and there’s amber and a salty note too, We’ve also made the concentration of the eau de parfum 18.5%…
It varies dramatically, depending on what I’m wearing, but perfume can make me feel anything from pacified to excited, and everything in between. The less I have to talk about myself the better really, I like that perfume is quite poetic in that respect, it can say a lot of stuff without saying very much.”
Sensibly, BeauFort offer sample sizes to buy, which we wish more perfumers did.
