The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
The X SÉ collection opens with a question: what does euphoria smell like? Not the soft-focus kind. The kind with a short fuse. Filippo Sorcinelli has always worked at the edge of sensory experience, translating music, memory, and ritual into scent. Here, the brief chemical high of alkyl nitrates becomes the brief chemical high of popper-pop: thirty seconds of salves and descents, of colors that weren't there, of a mind temporarily unlocked. The name is the program. The fragrance delivers it in fruity-sweet chemistry that hits fast and reads loud before settling into something stranger, softer, and far more interesting.
What makes this composition unusual is the synthetic quality threading through the sweetness. The sweet almond doesn't smell like marzipan or comfort, it leans medicinal, almost aldehydic, echoing the quick-acting pharmacology the name invokes. Mint cuts across it like a breath of cold air. The Nashi pear and red apple give it that initial burst of Fruity sweetness that then gets interrupted, disrupted, made strange by the davana herb coming up through the heart. Davana is not a common material, it carries a fruity-anise character that most perfumers use sparingly. Here, it amplifies the surreal quality, pushing the fragrance away from naturalism and into something more conceptual.
The evolution
The opening hits immediately, mint cold, sweet almond bright, the Nashi pear adding a watery crunch that feels both fresh and slightly synthetic. The red apple stays close to the skin throughout the heart phase, keeping the sweetness grounded. The first thirty minutes are the loudest, the most electric. Then the davana and magnolia take over, the davana adding an herbal lift, the magnolia bringing a waxy, almost candied warmth. The mint doesn't disappear. It retreats, becoming a cool undercurrent beneath the florals. The drydown is where it earns its name: coniferous woods and aromatic woods slowly exhale over the next 6-8 hours, soft and intimate once the initial rush fades. What lingers is the sweet almond, still present, still slightly medicinal, still faintly euphoric.
Cultural impact
Part of the X SÉ collection, popper-pop arrived in 2021 as the opening statement of an explicitly provocative four-fragrance series. The brand's own copy frames the collection around transgression, eroticism, and the act of breaking social patterns through sensory exploration. The fragrance itself leans into synthetic chemistry as a feature, not a flaw, a deliberate choice that divides opinion but defines the scent's character. Community reception since 2021 has been polarised in the way the brand seems to have intended.
