In Principio V2

What the air might have held at the Annunciation.

Unease across the Madonna's face, and the Archangel Gabriel holding a lily as white as snow. A sense of mystery and awe envelops the scene. Every Annunciation painting carries those.

Mace, the aril of the nutmeg, dried and tinctured and drawn to absolute, instills the courage and clarity it takes to say yes. Lilium candidum, enfleuraged from several hundred flowers gathered at full maturity, is pure white with striking yellow anthers, domesticated yet dense with meaning, and comes in powerful and waxy and at times almost fruity, a shameless and sensual apotheosis. Nagami kumquat, the Chinese mandarin given in even numbers for good luck, is cold-pressed from ripe fruit, sweet outside and tart within. Abundance held inside a tiny fruit.

All natural, so the colour can shift and a sediment can form. Use a little: it may stain light or delicate fabrics.

Zanini is two friends, Giacomo and Filippo, who worked side by side in an office for years before starting something else in 2023. The idea arrived in a car on the road from Prato to Basel, when Filippo mentioned in passing a decade spent making smellscapes: fragrances built out of the sensations of places both real and invented. Bureaucracy, small budgets and renovations followed, and the project took shape.

Everything is 100% natural, with no synthetic material anywhere. Most of the harvesting and processing is done by hand, by traditional methods, and they respect nature's timing, the right moment to pick and then months for extraction and maturation. Production is limited to under a thousand units a year, every bottle handmade and numbered, released as exclusive limited-edition projects, each with its own story.