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Geza Schoen, Perfumer and Co-Founder of Escentric Molecules on Cologne One, the Brand's First Ever Cologne Built Around Gin and Tonic Freshness
- Style Essentials Edit Team
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
Escentric Molecules has spent years making the fragrance world reconsider what a single molecule can do, building a devoted following around lab-born ingredients like Iso E Super, a compound created at IFF in 1973 that spent decades working quietly behind the scenes in perfumery, giving compositions a velvety, enveloping quality that most wearers could sense but never quite name, until Geza Schoen pulled it into the foreground in large concentrations and built the now cult-classic Molecule 01 around it as a single note, changing what many people thought they wanted from a fragrance in the process.
Cologne One, the brand's first venture into cologne, takes a different but equally considered direction, stripping the format back to its structural essentials and rebuilding it for a sensibility that has no patience for the heavy, over-constructed scents that defined the category for decades, drawing instead on the clarity and cold brightness of a gin and tonic, with juniper, lime, and citrus forming a fragrance composed almost entirely of top notes, sharpened with ginger for warmth and cucumber for crispness and held together with a restrained heart of iris, rose, and hedione that keeps the composition from collapsing into a single register. Schoen has described the thinking behind it as being about what you leave out rather than what you put in, and Cologne One wears that restraint visibly, the dry down staying linear and modern through the brand's signature. Iso E Super alongside Ambroxan and musk is just enough to carry the freshness through without weighing it down or pulling it in a direction it was never meant to go.
What separates it from most colognes technically is a 15% perfume oil concentration that gives genuine longevity without the density that concentration usually implies, so the fresh-out-of-the-shower quality that the gin and tonic reference sets up actually holds rather than disappearing before you have left the room, which has always been the central frustration with the format and the problem Schoen set out to solve with a gender-neutral scent that wears like a second skin and smells, above all else, like nothing pretentious.
Escentric Molecules Cologne One is available at escentric.com, priced at £100 / $175, shipping to the UK and US.
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