The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
The Puppet arrives from IM:SOLE, a contemporary house whose premise still circles around today: scent as a genderless language of self, not a costume. The label sits inside that idea, positioning fragrance as an emotional instrument the wearer composes for themselves, free from the industry's usual shelves and labels. Named The Puppet, it reads like a contradiction on purpose. The composition plays with the idea of strings, of being pulled by someone worth being pulled toward. The brand's own copy puts it plainly: I HATE GETTING TRAPPED, UNLESS ITS TRAPPED BY YOU. That tension, autonomy versus surrender, is the scent's first sentence before anyone smells a note. Florian Gallo composed it, and the result is green, sharp, and just warm enough underneath the citrus to feel deliberate.
What's worth noticing here is the structure. Most green-citrus compositions lean entirely on the top and leave you smelling like cologne by lunch. The Puppet threads black tea and pine through the heart, which acts as a bridge, an herbal dryness that keeps the bergamot and neroli from dissolving into generic shower-fresh territory. The guaiac wood and cedar base ground the whole arc in something smoked and woody without going dark. The black tea never announces itself as a literal cup on a table.
The evolution
The opening is loud, not loud as in projection, but loud as in present. Bergamot and green lemon cut against neroli's slight sweetness, and there's a briskness to the opening that reads like stepping outside in late October when the air has just turned. The citrus has a sharpened, almost metallic quality at first, the kind of brightness that makes you pay attention before the fragrance settles into itself. As it warms, the neroli softens the edges just enough to keep the opening from feeling aggressive, and there's a green, leafy facet underneath that gives the whole thing a sense of something living rather than composed. The sage is already present at this stage, lending a dry, slightly peppery undertone that stops the citrus from ever reading as simple. After a while, the citrus steps back and black tea arrives properly. It's not a hot, steeped-tea feeling.
Cultural impact
The Puppet sits inside IM:SOLE's The Play collection, a series of genderless compositions that lean conceptual. Within the broader fragrance community, the scent has gathered descriptions that point to its dryness and 'cold-brewed' character as what sets it apart from typical fresh fragrances in the same lane. Wearers tend to reach for words like 'green,' 'herbal,' and 'smoky' when describing it, and the consensus skews toward woody-aromatic with green-citrus facets, a combination that isn't easy to find executed with this much restraint.
