I’ve read this is a blend of burning rubber, vanilla, and car exhaust contained in a rubber hockey puck bottle. Intrigued with the description, I hunted for it, and hunt I did. Department store perfume counters, perfume discounters, and even Nordstrom seemed barren of it. I found every other color of Bulgari scent (Jasmin Noir made me pause for awhile, tho), except for Black.

Just when I thought I’d have to flush it out online …lo and behold! I wandered over to the men’s side of the new Sephora at the mall… Eureka! Hidden behind a box of some vile Armani scent; there it was, Mr. Black Hockey Puck himself!

Spritzed on paper, it’s surprisingly sweet, musky, and vanilla. On skin the industrial odors materialize…. It isn’t burning rubber, it’s melting polystyrene! it’s the sweet scent of touching a soldering iron to a foam drinks cooler, a melting plastic scent that has nothing to do with the vinyl-plasticky aldehydes in most perfumery. There’s a resinous smell mixed in with the vanilla, a slight spicy-syrupiness –Styrax or Benzoin? Rosin or Retsina? Maybe…

So who wants to smell of melting (not burning) plastic and vanilla-retsina syrup?

I DO.

It’s magnificent, evocative, unique, inspired, and just plain weird. It’s a shared-custody weekend at my dad’s place, playing with his soldering iron by testing what it’ll burn thru and wasting his rosin-core solder, followed by grandiosly buffoonish pseudo-academic baking experiments we were fond of, (e.g. Confectionary, My Dear Watson: The Effects of Vanilla Extract Infusion upon Apple Pie… an Experiment in Six Parts).

This scent is fascinating, odd, jarring, and sentimental (ok, maybe just to me). It’s a post-industrial-waste barren racetrack rush-hour experiment gone wrong all the right ways. A polyharmonic Penderecki concerto kind of fragrance, a harmony of perfect dissonance.