This perfumer discovered the scent of pure evil – and people love it

The creator of Toskovat doesn’t want you to wear his perfume. Specifically, Inexcusable Evil – a scent that contains notes of blood, bandages and burning flowers. “I really despise the smell,” he tells Dazed, speaking from his creative hub in Romania. David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi is the Bucharest-based nose behind this small batch perfumery that’s drawn a surge of interest amid a rise in perfumes with creative, unusual and even disturbing accords. “If we lived in a better world, there would not be a need for it to exist or to be remembered,” he says. Despite this, the scent is the brand’s bestseller by three times, and is currently sold out online.

The cult perfumery, which describes its products as a “portal to memory”, currently sells 13 fragrances with elaborate, storytelling scent profiles. Age of Innocence depicts the abrupt loss of youth via candy floss, a ‘metal screech’, rubber and gasoline. Anarchist A_, meanwhile, lists notes of ‘dirty dollars’, ‘credit cards’, ‘priest’s clothes’ and ‘snow’, here meaning cocaine. Released deliberately during the Christmas period, it was intended to critique consumerism and hustle culture. “It aims to portray our far departure from spirituality and community, towards money, stimulants and distractions,” Jipa-Slivinschi says.

Inexcusable Evil is a statement about modern-day warfare, a theme especially pertinent to Jipa-Slivinschi due to his lineage being both Russian and Ukrainian. “Sadly, war is still a reality in our present day, even if most of us are privileged enough to go about our days without thinking of it. Inexcusable Evil changes that – it doesn’t allow you to ignore the horrors of war. It applies to one’s skin the trauma that has haunted our species since its dawn. It shows how fragile everything is – our body, our buildings, our lives, and most disappointing of all – our morals.”

When developing the fragrance, Jipa-Slivinschi says he imagined a scent that would be so cold, so inorganic and so out of day-to-day life that it would trigger everybody who came in contact with it. To him, the final result is a combination of an open wound and a hospital smell and he truly believed he had created something so unnatural and sterile that no one would be able to find enjoyment in it. “I seem to have failed in my endeavour,” he says. “I imagined Inexcusable Evil would become more of a talking piece, or an object that startles. Going by numbers, as it’s our bestseller by three times, I can only imagine I failed in portraying the true horror. If I had succeeded, people would avoid it, not be drawn to it. Or maybe we are just moths and Inexcusable Evil is the flame.”

Before becoming a perfume maker, Jipa-Slivinschi was a filmmaker and he applies the same philosophy to his scents. “To me, the best scripts were always the ones that made us feel deeply for their characters. Same with fragrances, I prefer to conjure emotion and memory rather than likeability.” Yet he says the label isn’t about him sharing any political views. “I’m more interested in offering a tool for introspection. I wanted to bring out things and emotions you didn’t even know you had.” Jipa-Slivinschi says he’s found himself most intrigued by movies “that work as mirrors … That’s the main focus with Toskovat – showing you what you’ve kept bottled up.”

Below we asked him about creating some of these obscure notes, formulating perfumes that bring people to tears, and his thoughts on the mainstream fragrance industry.

What’s the process of getting something to smell like, say, blood?

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: Very few people realise that even notes like strawberry or pineapple are still things you’ve got to study and construct. Those could be just as difficult as making blood. Where it gets easier is when you do a note that somebody historically has done before you, like strawberry, which is prevalent in the cosmetics industry. Then you’ve got other people’s work that you can study, but when you want to do something that there’s not much literature on, you really have to go deep into the chemistry and search both nature and aroma chemicals and try to recreate that reality. Sometimes it works just on instinct. But there are some accords I’m still working on after two years. It just goes to show that almost everything in nature is related.

What have been your favourite comments about your work?

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: Someone in Hungary messaged me when they placed an order: ‘I’m only getting this because so many people are talking about it, but I’m sure it’s gonna be bullshit.’ That was the one order where I was tracking it more than the client, probably – I couldn’t wait for their feedback, I was so excited.

One day after receiving it, they messaged me saying, ‘I came with the worst intentions into this and I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised.’ They wrote about how they were transported to their childhood and, even though it wasn’t a pleasant memory, it was real – they felt like a child again, smelling the dirty banknotes their parents would give them to go to the convenience store. It’s stories like those that are a lot more special than when people say, ‘Oh it’s really nice’, or ‘It performs really well.’

Are there any other scents that you are due to release?

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: There’s a perfume that’s gonna come out called The Last Birthday Cake – it’s supposed to smell like all the cakes somebody eats in their lifetime. So it starts as a baby, where you don’t have teeth and you just drink milk, and it gets sweeter, it gets more gourmand and then it turns a bit boozy. And then finally when you’re old, once again you cannot eat the cake so you just smell the candles and the smoke. I was showing this to a lady and she instantly started crying. She later went on to tell me that it was a perfume that reminded her of her late husband and that she’d been both searching and avoiding this smell for like 20 years. It was really emotional.

Talking about scents being personal, fragrances can smell very different based on who wears them, can’t they?

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: It's not just about your skin. When we were starting out and I was formulating the batches, I wore the same perfume over the course of a month and a half. Once in Bucharest, once in Paris, Milan, Dubai. So all the variables were the same, you know – me, the perfume was definitely the same, it was just the difference in humidity, I suppose, and the climate. It was almost like four different perfumes. It’s incredible how much can affect it. Everybody’s gonna get a different experience, it remains really, really personal.

You’re doing something radically different from mainstream, commercial fragrance – what do you think about that industry and the way perfumes are marketed?

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: It’s funny how people can latch onto marketing so much – if something says lemon, they really believe it’s lemon oil, and if they say it’s a female fragrance and can’t be sprayed on a man. But I think because [fragrance] has so much history, it’s now over 150 years old, we just take it as a given, we don’t stop and think about it. When they find a formula that works, they tend to – like in film – make small variations on the same recipe, because it’s been proven to work and easier to get investment and distribution. So there’s always going to be less risk and less creativity at the industrial level. But there’s nothing inherently bad about it, it’s just the way every industry works, I think.

With Inexcusable Evil, though, it’s interesting how you’ve created this product that you don’t want people to engage with or buy.

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: This week I saw a TikTok by somebody in the United States and they were going on about how pleasant it is and how much they love wearing it. And I was like, ‘Ah, she’s missing the point!’ And then another one where a reviewer – that one was actually quite funny because the person that was using it was interpreting it as an old age sort of castle smell. And that gave me a whole new perspective. I went and tried it myself and tried to do some mental gymnastics to be transported to the same place where he was.

What else are you working on?

David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi: I wanted to make something that was intrinsically Romanian, and there’s one I’m working on – there’s a particular smell in the Moldova region during the summertime. We have spectacular medieval churches that have been hand-painted, and when the sun hits that really old paint and mixes with the incense and the nature around it, because it’s really green and lush, it gives a positive and calming smell. It’s not incense like in Anarchist A_ where it’s imposing, heavy and you feel intimidated by a big cathedral. It’s a lot more intimate and a lot more optimistic, which is something I feel like is lacking from Toskovat. I’m trying my best to make more optimistic stuff while staying true to myself.