D.S. & Durga Debaser

D.S. & Durga is the Brooklyn house of David Seth Moltz and Kavi Moltz, a husband-and-wife team who describe themselves plainly on their own site as having turned what they loved in music, nature, myth and design into fragrance out of a small Bushwick apartment. David, who signs as D.S., is a self-taught perfumer, which in an industry built on Grasse training and corporate laboratories is genuinely unusual, and the house says so directly. Kavi, an architect by training, is the Durga of the name.

Debaser, released in 2015, is named after the Pixies song, and the house is explicit about the reference. Its own copy describes the wild shrill of indie rock coming through a college radio station in hot August heat, which is more useful as a description than most marketing prose. The listed pyramid is bergamot, green leaf and pear stem at the top; fig, coconut milk and iris at the heart; and blond woods, tonka bean and moss in the base.

What it actually smells like is fig done properly. Not fig jam, but a fig tree: the sappy green of broken stems, the milky bitterness of the unripe fruit, the dusty warmth of the leaf. Coconut milk sits underneath as lactonic softness rather than sunscreen sweetness, and iris adds a cool powder that keeps the middle from turning tropical. The dry-down is quiet, pale woods and tonka with a damp mossy edge, and it stays very close to the skin.

Humidity genuinely improves it, which very little else manages. A muggy coastal evening in Durban is exactly the weather it was written about, and it is equally at home on a hot still afternoon anywhere. Unisex without qualification.

Be realistic about performance. This is a soft, transparent composition and it wears like one: four to six hours, low projection after the first thirty minutes, and it becomes a skin scent quickly. That is a deliberate choice rather than a fault, but if you want a fragrance people notice from across a room this is not it. It remains in production in current form, with a rollerball oil and other formats available alongside the eau de parfum.