Funkberry

It started when I noticed it in myself. The urge to go overfunk. When, while wearing Private Blend, I had a strange craving to smell more currantfunk.

But it wasn’t just me.

These limited edition Private Blends each hit a nerve. It wasn’t just me who craved more funk, or who relished the stronger waves of currant…

The reason these urges came out, and why they were shared by lovers of Private Blend is because we were lovers of Private Blend. We studied the fragrance; explored its scentscape; became intimately familiar with the profile.

Of course, the more you dive into the scent you realize it wasn’t the funk or the blackcurrant – it was the currantfunk. The currant and the musk. How currants jam with muskrat; how currant juices up castoreum. 

The result was that now I wanted to dive even deeper into these funky waters!

And that’s how we got here. Funkberry was composed to explore this tension in perfumery: how to fuse the vivid, mouthwatering profile of ripe berries with the dense, animalic complexity of aged musk, oud, and all the other naughties. We took the lessons learned through tweaking my Private Blend to create a brand new frag that hones in on the berries and the funk to craft a technical composition that showcases how fruit aromatics behave when exposed to the most challenging fixatives in perfumery.

The starting point was a blackcurrant accord – built not from synthetic esters but from raw materials that mimic the tartness, juiciness, and violet-like zing of real fruit. This was layered with cassis absolute and violet leaf to reinforce the green and purple facets, then stabilized with a trace of peach lactone to round the edges. The result is a berry profile that’s not candy-sweet, but sharp, saturated, and brings to life the facets that gave Currantfunk and Funkmaster their sensual, delectable oomph.

What happens when you take the juiciest, most violet-stained berry nectar and drag it through the deepest, darkest corridors of musk and oud? You get a frag that doesn’t just flirt with funk, but bathes in it. 

The opening is a slap of berry funk – raspberry syrup dripping over violet leaf dipped in strawberry jam, cassie stained by blackcurrant tangled with kewda and jasmine, and pierced by a rare batch of 1950s French iris. But the berries don’t stay sweet. They get dragged through the jungle by a beast of a Vietnamese oud that’s so zesty and savory it makes the fruit bite back. This isn’t fruit salad… it’s a spritz of fermented alien jam smeared across a musk-drenched oud slab.

You’ve got all the funky culprits, from aged black-skinned musk pods to aged, ocean-baked, squid-beak-laced black ambergris to muskrat, civet, and castoreum. For the funk, you bet! But they also act as structural, molecular amplifiers. They enhance projection, and give the berries a pheromonal shimmer that’s equal parts seductive and… seductive.

These naughty funkifiers don’t just fix the scent, but mutate it. Flowers don’t smell like flowers anymore. Oud doesn’t smell like oud. Everything becomes alchemized into a new olfactory species.

And we deliberately didn’t use animalic oud, but a wild vintage oud distillation that smells like tobacco barrels dragged through wet earth, salty stone, and the finesse of a temple steeped in incense.

The floral heart includes vintage iris (our 1950s French extraction), jasmine, and blue waterlily. These were chosen for their ability to interact with both the berry and the musk. Iris adds powder and cream, jasmine injects an indolic zest pitch, and waterlily introduces a faint aquatic haze that helps lift the heavier materials.

Spices – nutmeg, clove, and Sichuan pepper, to name a few – were added in microdoses to stir movement. They don’t register as “spicy” in the traditional sense, but they help prevent the composition from becoming static. Combined with the oud and musk and flowers, they create a kind of olfactory turbulence that keeps the berry notes in check.

Oh, yes… let’s not forget about the top notes. Or let’s, for a change – because you’re welcome to try to pin down the mandarin and yuzu and frankincense, but you wouldn’t have to because they’re laced with berries and oudy funk – and that’s what Funkberry is about! 

Funkberry is not a berry perfume. It’s not a musk perfume. It’s not an oud perfume. It’s a system where fruit, funk, and fixatives are engineered to behave as one. A berry-slicked, musk-drenched, oud-glazed beast that smells like alien fruit fermented in a tobacco barrel and aged under the sun for half a century. If you’re into clean, safe spritzes, walk away. Funkberry bites. 

Ships by 29 Sep.

Featured Testimonials…

Funkberry smells like berries from another planet. It’s not going to remind you of any particular berry, but I can imagine when you combine an assortment of unlimited berries put them in a barrel and ferment it for decades it would probably smell something like this once you open that barrel.

 

It’s not jammy sweet, or funky animalic. It’s a mixture of sweet, sour, oudy, and musky berries topped with some florals that smell boozy and you would want to taste it.

 

The image that comes to mind for me is like this. A barrel full of aged and fermented berries, oud, musk, and flowers from a different planet that was just found by humans on Earth. When we unlocked that barrel, we discovered a scent now known as Funkberry.

 

This is my personal and first impression. Yours can be different.

—Rezwan G / Canada