Like a bat with a 9 to 5, Mr. Chokkattu hasn’t really slept in two days, so I’m writing this review after cuddling him to sleep at an incredibly early hour (It’s 9PM! Madness!)

I was a little afraid of staying in bed to write it actually, because as you’ll read in my review, the Bat is quite assertive, and the last thing I want to do is for him to wake up and not get all the sleep he needs. He was zoning out a lot during dinner with my parents earlier, which was perfectly fine because they like him and I explained that he hadn’t slept, I’m just concerned about his welfare.

So right now I’m sitting in the corner of my room with a blanket wrapped around me writing this review. It’s probably 65 degrees in my room and very airy, while the subway train I first sprayed this in accidentally was hot and humid.

Zoologist Bat

Wow, that’s…soil. Straight up dirt. Miracle-Gro maybe a day after it hits the pot or the garden. Pungent, fruity, a little vegetable, a little fermented, musky, moist earth. Oh, and olives for some reason. And that’s what I get just from the cap, and from the cap a full two feet away. It’s comparable to Byredo Pulp if you remove the sweet-drink-in-the-sun vibe and then stuff it into the dark forest ground for hibernation.

On my wrist, the darker bitter notes immediately jump to the forefront, smelling like vetiver and dirty hippie patchouli (which I don’t mind, incidentally), clay, and slightly like banana peel and figs. There’s a mango somewhere in the background, rotting. Some myrrh and amber for a slightly rounded effect. The extreme soil smell dissipated rather quickly (the first time I put it on, soil and fruit was all I could smell for hours) and now it’s a very big, much more wearable dry fragrance. The vetiver and patchouli are king for that first hour.

After an hour, the bitterness and the fruit are much more balanced, though the notes don’t develope in a linear fashion. On my wrist, every time I sniff it’s like it’s a different fragrance, the focus jumping from bitter vetiver and patchouli, to fermented fruity notes to creamy resins, in random order.

It’s certainly unique. Mr. Chokkattu is a fan, moreso than I am, and he likes that it’s fruity but not sweet, which I do think is a laudable feat in fragrance and is probably part of why it won Zoologist the 2016 Art and Olfaction awards for Independent Perfume House. Wear it as part of your manhunt camouflage, or if you need to convince your mom that you totally didn’t smoke pot while you were “camping.”