The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Barcelona has more than 400 dragon statues scattered across the city, on rooftops, in parks, woven into the ironwork of lampposts. They are everywhere and nowhere, depending on where you look. Drakon is named for those creatures: the ones guarding treasures in Park Guell, the ones winding through the balconies of La Sagrada Familia, the ones that have been part of the city's Modernist imagination since Gaudi made them part of the landscape. Perfumer Jordi Fernandez built this fragrance around that tension, the protective and the feral, the green coolness of a forest and the heat of something ancient underneath. The dragon isn't just a mascot. It's a structural idea. Cool at first. Then teeth.
What makes Drakon work is the interplay between two materials you don't often see together: French cypress and betel pepper. Cypress gives the green, the Mediterranean evergreen sharpness, the smell of a forest after rain, the resinous coolness that anchors a lot of Catalan landscape. The betel pepper is stranger. It's aromatic, slightly numbing, with a tropical edge that most Western perfumery ignores. Together, they create an opening that is neither purely fresh nor purely spicy, it's its own category. Then Akigalawood, a proprietary material that blends oud and akigalawood, pushes the composition into something darker and more resinous.
The evolution
The opening hits fast and sharp, cypress, black pepper, betel. For the first thirty minutes, the composition is all green freshness and botanical clarity. Then the handoff happens: Akigalawood and cypriol arrive together, pushing the fragrance into darker territory. This is where Drakon stops pretending to be polite. The leather accord appears in the heart, not just as a base note waiting in the wings. It's already there, woven through the composition, giving the oud and spice something to lean against. By the third hour, the drydown settles. Leather, sandalwood, and balsam fir create something warm and close, not projecting anymore, but intimate and persistent. On fabric, the sandalwood and leather stay for 8-10 hours. On skin, it follows the warmth. The next morning, what's left is the quiet woodsmoke of the cypriol and the soft animalic trace of the leather. This is a fragrance that builds its structure slowly and then holds it.
Cultural impact
Drakon sits in the Bestial Collection alongside fragrances that explore the more primal side of perfumery, leather, animalic notes, raw materials. Within the niche market, it occupies a specific space: green enough to be approachable, woody enough to be serious, with enough leather and oud to signal that it's not playing it safe. The Barcelona connection runs deeper than marketing, the Modernist architecture, the dragon imagery, the Mediterranean climate all feed into a fragrance that feels rooted in a specific place without being confined to it.
