It’s a brave new world for Beaufort London’s beloved but perhaps most mercurial creation. Fathom V: Director’s Cut dives deeper than its 2016 predecessor, transformed into an extrait with a monumental 50% perfume oil concentration.
This limited edition is no mere reissue it’s a clarion call to resurrection, where “nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.”
And fade it certainly does not.
From the first spray, the familiar salt and sap-laden green of Fathom V surges forward, but that “big green beast” is now ionised and electrified. Juniper, blackcurrant and green leaves flash like phosphorescent light across dark waves before sinking into the depths. Beneath, a bloom of white lilies and jasmine glimmers through the murkiness: crystalline, cool, and perfectly preserved as though sealed in brine for eternity. It’s got a pearlescent quality, but as though the pearls were wrapped in leather then cast into the sea. You sense them unravelling, entwining themselves with fronds of seaweed before coming to rest on the ocean floor.
A sooty leather note rises like mist from the water, then settles close to the skin, wrapping you tightly in its embrace. Just when you think you know its course, the weather turns. Ghostly voices seem to call through the deep — “full fathom five thy father lies” — and the fragrance reverberates through you, immense and unyielding. It is both eerily calm and wildly alive, each molecule charged with emotion.
An aura of déjà vu haunts the wearer with this new take on Fathom V, in which we feel the presence of the original, but its shape is in sharper focus; we are up close with every facet of the fragrance, and there is no escape.
As the tide of moss, vetiver and cedar ebbs and flows back to the verdant beginning once again, and the vision replays, one could almost whisper with Shakespeare’s forsaken castaway: “when I waked, I cried to dream again.”
Dare to dream, and intensely, I say…
Review by Suzy Nightingale | On The Scent Magazine @onthescentmedia
Fathom V: Director’s Cut -Review by Suzy Nightingale
