Treachery

The words painted under Magritte's pipe.

Treachery takes its name from Magritte's This Is Not a Pipe — the gap between an object and its image, a scent and its notes. Nothing here is the thing itself, only extraction and reproduction of it. Pipe tobacco sits at the center, warmed by vanilla absolute, sweet almond, and cocoa. Whiskey and saffron cut through with spice, davana and berries adding a low sweetness underneath. It's built from ingredients closer to daily life than the house's usual palette — indulgent, self-comforting, the kind of scent that asks nothing of the wearer.

Maher Olfactive is the work of Shawn Maher. The wish to make without restrictions on budget or materials led to this house. Olfactory art for art's sake: classic materials reframed in a way that presents them with a new sense of wonder. Behind the releases: a creek in the woods behind a grandmother's house south of Saint Louis, a sailors' saying about the sky, a line of T.S. Eliot's, the words painted under Magritte's pipe, a song of The Jesus and Mary Chain's.

Among the materials: osmanthus absolute taken by some of its less celebrated sides, its sweet, rich side made richer still through an oil made from lavender flowers alone, so none of the camphor of the stems comes with it; a coffee tincture Maher made from a locally roasted Yirgacheffe; and pipe tobacco and whiskey, not truly the things themselves but reproductions of them, extractions and distillations.