The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Det. Patric Gleason comes from the Witchblade collection, a series Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab built around the Top Cow comic book universe. The name belongs to a character from those pages, and the scent was treated accordingly: not an abstract mood, but a portrait of a specific person, drawn in aromatic shorthand. Launched in 2010, the fragrance was composed by Elizabeth Moriarty Barrial, who serves as BPAL's brand owner and perfume maker. Her approach to character-driven oils treats each scent as a vignette, and Patric Gleason gets the full treatment. The gunpowder isn't decorative. The citrus note brings a bright, almost bracing lift, a quick flare of peel and pith that cuts through the sharper elements before settling back.
What's interesting here is the compression. Most fragrances spread their identity across top, heart, and base like a conversation with breathing room. This one doesn't waste breath. The whole structure is built on collision. The fougère accord provides a familiar herbal thread, something clean and composed that keeps the sharper notes from flying apart. It borrows the visual language of traditional men's grooming, the lavender-and-oakmoss shorthand that's been around for over a century, and uses it as a tether.
The evolution
The first five minutes are loud. Gunpowder hits sharp and metallic, almost chemical, riding over a flash of citrus that tries to lighten it. The fougère underneath is already pulling things toward something herbal and clean, like aftershave on a warm neck. As the composition settles, the citrus recedes and the leather steps forward. Not soft suede, but the stiff, slightly animal kind, the leather of a coat that's been worn in weather. The gunpowder softens too, losing its edge and settling into something warmer, more like woodsmoke or the air after a match is struck. The fougère holds its ground through all of this, keeping the whole thing tethered to the world of classic men's cologne. Eventually, what remains is mostly leather with a dry, smoky shadow of the gunpowder still clinging to it. The fougère has almost entirely faded.
Cultural impact
Det. Patric Gleason lives in a specific corner of fragrance culture: the comic book tie-in, the character portrait rendered in oil. It's part of BPAL's Witchblade collection, which means it exists for fans of the Top Cow universe who want their collection to smell like the pages. Outside that audience, it functions as a curiosity, a leather-and-gunpowder composition that pulls against the conventions of mainstream men's fragrance. The scent is deliberately odd: gunpowder notes are rare in commercial perfumery, and pairing them with leather and a fougère backbone produces something that resists easy categorization.
