Skank

Some heat is best met alone.

Sugar arrives first, pink and chewed-soft. Then the flowers come up damp...jasmine, tuberose, osmanthus, sweating in the sun. A clementine is peeled somewhere close by, and the bright sharpness of it cuts across the sweetness for a moment. Sunscreen settles over warm shoulders. Sandalwood stays underneath, smooth and unhurried, holding everything in place.

Thinking gives way to feeling. What's left is a body in high summer, sweet and a little feral, alone and entirely fine with it. This is for long afternoons with nowhere to be and no one to answer to.

BARRE is a collection of fine fragrances by visual artist and independent perfumer Bree Hyland, composed in a studio in rural Mi'kma'ki, Nova Scotia, on the seaside edge of Plekteaq. Made in small batches, vegan and cruelty-free, each scent is built as an atmosphere — a place, a mood, a character — designed to draw the wearer back to the tangible.

The collection moves with range and a certain swagger. Hyland's perfumery is emotive and psychological, willing to be cheeky, willing to be dark, and always composed with an artist's eye for what scent can suggest beyond itself.