White Whale by Masque Milano

Recently, I’ve been swimming in a sea of gourmand fragrances of one sort or another, and much as I enjoy a good gourmand, my nose needed a rest from this specific type of scent. To that end, I delved into the depths of my sample box and pulled from it a fragrance distinctly different: White Whale by Masque Milano.

Masque Milano is a brand that I often find skirts an interesting line between very beautiful and slightly grotesque. They certainly understand that good perfumes need to have both light and shade. I went into White Whale expecting it to challenge me, and being up for that tussle, but I don’t think I really anticipated what a haunting perfume this would turn out to be.

The opening to White Whale is pretty much as I imagined prior to smelling it, only dialled down a notch or two. The fragrance does have a salty, briny feel, but it doesn’t have that photorealistic seaside seaweed slap that a fragrance like Silence The Sea by Strangelove has. It isn’t challenging in that sense - you don’t get that concentrated blast of wet, brine-soaked vegetation. Instead, White Whale focuses on cold seawater, salty, slightly threatening somehow - like a storm is brewing. There’s a sort of malevolence about the way that the scent opens, that feeling that the sea isn’t calm, isn’t the sort of place where kids should paddle their feet, instead it’s vaguely dangerous and demands respect. I found this tone to be very much in keeping with the idea of Moby Dick as the reference and inspiration for the scent too, in a way that was both satisfying and felt appropriate for the source text. 

Whispers of sinuous incense creep through the scent, adding to the moodiness in one way, but adding a hint of reverence in another. The incense mixes with the saltier facets, becoming indistinguishable as it recedes. Are we sailing away from safe harbour? From solid things like stone buildings, chapels where incense is burned?

A cold, mineral feel permeates the fragrance, the salty rope accord, but it's very textural. You can feel the salt crystals forming in the rope fibres, feel how cold and rough they would be on your fingertips. Generally, the first half of the fragrance does lean towards very cool - making it a good scent for the summer months, perhaps. It has the cold spareness of something like L’Eau D’Hiver by Frederic Malle but in a way that is salt-watery rather than snow-powdery.

The salty feel takes ages to recede. Gradually, as if coming slowly to the surface of the murky blue-green depths a ghostly floral element starts to take shape. Genuinely, the first time I wore the fragrance on my skin, this phase gave me goosebumps. Imagine a white whale slowly surfacing from the depths, only instead of an animalic whale what emerges is a pale, fleshy flower. That’s the feeling this gave me; whiteness slowly emerging out of blue-green depths. I don’t think I would have pinpointed this floral aspect as either osmanthus or violet, instead it felt somewhere between iris and magnolia to me. Pale, fleshy, slightly waxy, but ghostly too, spectral, like you aren’t sure if what you are smelling is real or not. Perhaps it will vanish through a wall, or melt into the ether if you look at it too square-on. 

All that said though, what I notice here in the heart of the scent is most definitely floral, ghostly though that may be, and veiled with an ambergris chiffon which obscures the viewer further. I can’t get away from feeling the spectral tone of the scent, and the way in which that contrasts strongly to the textural salt crystals at the start of the composition. 

Later, I get the violets coming through more distinctly, only now it is as if they are blown to you on the breeze. An olfactory hint at a distant island perhaps? But work too hard to find it and it is gone again in a whisper. 

Towards the end of the fragrance, I notice the vetiver more and more, but it feels aromatic and lifting rather than earthy or heavy. In some respects, the scent seems to evolve less between the middle and end than it does between the beginning and middle. There are changes there, but they are more subtle and less of a revelation than the move from salt crystals to flower petals is. 

White Whale is a sensitive, thoughtful and haunting composition. It might lack the high drama of some of Masque Milano’s more provocative compositions, but I found it to be deep and interesting. Perhaps because I tested it at a time when my part of the world was experiencing drab and stormy winter weather, but I found it to be deeply contemplative, introspective and somewhere between soothing and unsettling - but in a good sort of unsettling way, if that’s possible. It’s certainly one of the more evocative and storied perfumes I have tried lately.

To be honest, I didn’t really expect to like White Whale. I thought it would be stronger, more animalic, and too ‘on the nose’ for my tastes, so it has surprised me just how much I enjoyed this ghostly, Gothic composition. It takes me to the heart of a novel, to dark nights and darker seas, and I was very much convinced by the world that it creates.