The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Poisonous Roots arrives in 2026 from Sorce, a fragrance house built around compositions that lean into the stranger corners of botanical perfumery. The name lands on purpose. The fragrance takes its cue from a long lineage: Catherine de' Medici, Cleopatra, Lucrezia Borgia, Empress Wu Zetian. Women whispered about across centuries for their knowledge of plants and poisons, and the ruthless willingness to use both. This is a scent built around that tension, botanical knowledge as something intimate and slightly dangerous. It belongs to Sorce's The Furies collection, a line that draws on feminine power that has always existed in the margins of history. The composition itself is steeped in black tea, warmed by milk, and tangled with jasmine absolute, incense smoke, and black amber.
What makes the composition unusual is the collision. Black tea and jasmine absolute share a strange chemical neighborhood, but the way they meet here refuses to settle into anything tame. The jasmine absolute doesn't play the romantic. It sits inside a milky tea brew and gets sharpened by incense smoke and black amber until the florals stop smelling like flowers and start smelling like something distilled in a back room. The milk note is the surprise anchor.
The evolution
The opening is a negotiation between black tea and milk. Steeped and tannic on one side, warm and almost edible on the other. The first moments feel like a kitchen: slightly sweet, faintly herbal, something simmering on a back burner. Jasmine absolute enters without warning, sprawling into the space the tea carved out. The floral here is loud, unapologetic, less a bouquet and more a living thing that wandered into the room. Incense smoke threads through everything soon after, smoldering rather than sharp. The composition breathes like a room where someone burned something on purpose, and the smoke never quite clears. As the hours pass, the top notes recede and the base takes over. Black amber and vanilla absolute settle into the skin, warm and resinous, with a milky sweetness still clinging underneath. The incense fades to a thread but never fully disappears.
Cultural impact
Poisonous Roots draws on a long historical lineage of women who knew their plants too well, and the fragrance wears that inheritance openly. The Furies collection, to which it belongs, builds its identity around figures like Catherine de' Medici, Cleopatra, Lucrezia Borgia, and Empress Wu Zetian, women who were whispered about across centuries for their knowledge of what grew in the garden and what could be done with it. The composition itself leans into that territory, herbal and milky, threaded with incense smoke and a jasmine that refuses to behave.
