A Clove That Cleaves to a Better Bitter Almond: Universe of Harth Keeps the Hearth Fires Glowing
Even though it’s right there in the word, I find that people sometimes don’t realize that ‘decadence’ as a concept proceeds from decay. The decadent literary movements of the second half of the nineteenth century in France and elsewhere in Europe signaled not only a fascination with pleasure, hedonism, artifice, and excess, but the potency of those impulses in the context of civilization’s decline and the erosion of a shared moral code. To paraphrase and willfully abstract Michelle Obama, ‘When they go low, we go wide and wanton and wild.’ One could think of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence as a coalition project that has raised money for AIDS research and community causes since the beginning of the 1980s while espousing an ethics of camp, festivity, and irreverence.
Coping with the changing times often requires several different tool sets to be swapped out nimbly as the situation demands. As an educator, I regularly ask myself when it’s more important to equip my students with the skills and tools to survive the world they are part of, and when they need inspiration and empowerment to dream up and realize a different world altogether. Decadence as a concept is perhaps associated equally with the decorative, the demonic, and a delirium of zealous if not also reckless living. Cognizant of the always-and-forever structural inevitability that empires fall—eventually—decadence produces alternate worlds and ways of inhabiting them. Decay and rot fertilizes new growth; decadence likewise opens up a new universe of aesthetics, desire, pleasure, and gratification.
Fragrance notes
It’s with this in mind that I consider the young perfume brand Universe of Harth, one of a number of really exciting independent perfumeries to be born in the Midwestern United States in recent years, alongside such artful outfits as Pearfat, agar olfactory, and Clue. Universe of Harth is the brainchild of Amanda Christine Harth, a multihyphenate fashion designer, perfumer, textile artist, and entrepreneur based in Chicago. Founded in 2020 under the name At Humans, Universe of Harth now operates out of the Zhou B Art Center—a huge multistory converted factory building chock full of galleries and studios, regularly activated by nights of music, performance, mixology, and cultural programming. That Zhou B is a few minutes from my own studio is just an added bonus. The blend of artistic milieus at the Art Center is apropos context for Harth, who runs in influential circles of future oriented creatives: along with Felton E. Kizer, she founded Monday Coffee Co., and under the auspices of the Universe brand, she’s created an exclusive fragrance for the hip boutique Emily Hotel and collaborated with the lifestyle and curatorial platform Finding Ijeoma among other snazzy folks. Universe of Harth has a collection of sprays intended for use on skin, linens, or rooms, and has also developed small batch incenses and candles. The brand has also opened up booking private one-on-one fragrance sessions at their studio.
Along with collaborations and scents designed and distributed for specific clients, Universe of Harth has a collection of seven perfumes on offer. I was drawn to Harth not only because its name suggests itself as the house’s signature, but because its combination of spice, liqueur, and warming coumarin sweetness conjure an atmosphere of understated grandeur. The perfumer describes inspiration taken from holidays and her grandmother’s house; those festive and intimate intonations certainly translate.
Harth is like biting into an almond brandy bonbon. The centerpiece of amaretto is accented with clove and tonka—like a shot of Italian liqueur dropped into a Dr. Pepper or cherry cola. The depth achieved with these notes evokes a coolly plush interior with shiny dark woods and a lightly smoky air of mystique.
I adore clove. At first, my appreciation had to set aside its association to baked hams and pretentious art school students, but gradually I came to love it even for those applications and more. It’s like a close friend of anise, similarly spiced, but curled into a wicked smile. In Harth, the blend has sassafras characteristics, with woody and powdery aspects that compliment the nutty-fruity boozy through line.
Of course our personal associations to this or that note are, well, personal and eccentric and unique and sometimes, oftentimes, neurotic. I can’t smell tonka without thinking of my father, who had a preference for tonka forward fragrances from the ’80s like Joop! Homme. I’ve always wished he could have smelled Lalique Satine, one of the tonkas with which I am besotted, and frequently while wearing Harth, I find myself imagining how he’d appreciate the shadowy cane sugar qualities with which it expresses the vanillic parts of its temperament.
While a flutter of tonka bean makes a sweet start, Harth dips into darker, more bittersweet tones across wearing. Allusions to chocolate cordials give way to pipe tobacco and rumination in overstuffed armchairs. Wearing it, I drift into fantasies of the parties A’Lelia Walker hosted in the 1920s at ‘the Dark Tower,’ her name for her Harlem townhouse. Bitter almond beguiles in the fragrance’s later passages, twirls of delicate smoke and musk luxuriating on and around skin.
Harth turns the lights low, letting glimmers and twinkles spell out seductions in rhythmic code. It hums an intercontinental song along the paths of the Silk Road and the trade routes in and out of Indonesia from whence the clove issues. Culinary, medicinal, and fragrant, clove’s appearance in Harth holds a hell of a lot of history and references its various restorative uses. Harth’s almond isn’t a light, fluffy pastry cream or a macaron, but something deeper—the fruit of the tree that grew from Agdistis in Greek myth. It’s a bit of adoration magic for a complicated goddess.
Harth is my introduction to the Universe of Harth—and it’s a spectacular start leaving me eager to seek out some of their other scents.