The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Christopher Brosius drew the name from Stevie Smith's poem "Black March". The opening lines read: "I have a friend at the end of the world / His name is a breath of fresh air." That contradiction, a friend at the edge of everything, made of nothing but air, became the brief. Brosius had been building CB I Hate Perfume as an archive of smell-memories, personal and unrepeatable. Black March was the first of those memories to arrive fully formed from someone else's poetry rather than his own. The poem provided not just an image but a complete emotional landscape, something bleak yet oddly intimate, isolated yet somehow connected. Brosius worked to capture that tension, translating the poem's atmosphere into a fragrance that feels both remote and deeply personal.
What makes Black March unusual is its refusal of warmth. The scent stays cool, the temperature of soil in early morning, before sun hits it. The rain accord isn't aquatic in the conventional sense. It's not water as a material. It's the smell of wet surfaces: bark after downpour, stone made slick, the air after a storm has passed through and left everything gleaming. Oakmoss anchors it to something older than fashion. Green notes, buds, plant sap, keep it from being purely mineral. It smells like a season remembering itself. The entire composition refuses to comfort.
The evolution
It opens cool and immediate. Soil tincture meets rain accord, not rain falling, but rain having fallen. The green arrives next: the tight snap of buds, plant sap in cold stems, something almost ozonic in its clarity. In the early phase you are in a forest path after a storm, wet earth beneath and damp air above. Then the woody base asserts itself: tree bark, a whisper of oakmoss, something that reads as both cool and intimate. The progression moves from bright, sharp notes toward something deeper, more grounded. The initial impression of cold mineral and fresh rain gives way to earth that feels older, more settled. Woody elements arrive gradually, not replacing the green notes so much as layering beneath them, adding weight without losing clarity. The bark accord becomes more pronounced as the top notes fade, offering something that feels both cool and intimate at once.
Cultural impact
Black March is a fragrance inspired by a poem by Stevie Smith. The literary reference gives it a different kind of weight than most fragrances carry. Rather than evoking a place or a single ingredient, it draws on a text that exists in a particular emotional register, melancholy and strange. Brosius has described perfume as a conversation with the self, and Black March is that conversation made concrete. It stands apart from other rain-and-earth fragrances because it refuses to offer comfort. Where many fragrances in this category lean toward warmth, softness, a version of wet earth that smells like a cozy evening, Black March keeps its cool.
