A beach, for many, is likely somewhere tropical: an infinite stretch of turquoise ocean, a blazing sunset, cabanas, and the smell of boozy drinks and coconut rum tanning lotion. This is a warm place, a safe place. This is the beach of postcards and travel advertisements. And there are fragrances that tell that story: Virgin Island Water, Party in the Bay, Endless Summer. But there is another kind of beach, colder, but no less beautiful. Rocky shores, dark waters, crashing waves, and replacing the smell of coconut rum is seaweed, cold salt water, and something mineral lying just underneath, waiting, as if the ocean has been here longer than pleasure has and intends to remain long after it has gone. A New England beach, where even after the dogdays of summer arrive, in June and July, the water is often still too cold to swim. New Englanders brave and embrace it, rather than luxuriate in it. This is the home of Sarah Baker’s Atlante: beautiful and sublime.

The first breath is sweet, salty and dry simultaneously — a contradiction that somehow resolves immediately into something coherent. Indeed, after the initial tug and pull of the opening, before it decides where it’s going, Atlante resembles other, more tropical aquatics, mentioned above. But yuzu, rather than lime, and lily-of-the-valley, rather than coconut. And Orris—often described as frozen lilacs—cool this fragrance. This composition moves the profile north, away from the tropics. Coastal Maine, Southeastern Massachusetts, towns like New Bedford and Fairhaven, where fortunes were made and lost in whaling; and Newport, R.I., famed for its cliff walk, a three-and-a-half-mile foot path skirting gilded-age estates such as The Breakers, Marble House, and Rosecliff, among others. This is Atlante’s first chapter.

Northern shorelines both look and feel different than those in more southern climes. Rather than sandy beaches, rocky bluffs; instead of gentle breezes, the seasonal Nor’easter; and specifically for Atlante, rather than sun kissed and coconut-rum tanned bodies browning in the sun, a lone socialite on her own private section of the New England coast, the north Atlantic winds whipping her salt-scented hair like a banner, this way and that, as she looks out upon the vast expanse. A portrait of beauty created in scent.

And yet, the fragrance is not cold. Far from it. But Atlante’s warmth does not come from the atmosphere or the climate. The ambergris in the base holds the seaweed from the top, forces it to linger, does not let go so easily. The seaweed is still there, hours into the narrative. Together, they emit warmth as a soft animalic quality of human skin. Skin that has been playing in waters saltier than the tropics; skin bedewed with the mists from crashing waves; hair dry and frazzled by salty air. Warm, sensual, mineral rather than syrupy sweet, this is where Atlante most assertively separates itself from its tropical cousins.

That is the beauty of Atlante.

The double-edge here, though, is that where other aquatics are picturesque, Atlante is sublime. The Romantics understood the sublime as “an overwhelming aesthetic experience of awe, terror, and grandeur in nature”. This sense of looming danger, awe, exists perpetually on the edge of Atlante. In fact, this was likely Sarah McCartney’s — the nose behind Atlante — intent. When composing this fragrance, she was thinking of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid. Not the Disney version. The other, darker narrative, the one where she gives up her voice, suffers with every step on land, and ultimately dissolves into sea foam without getting what she wanted, before rising to heaven. That darkness is there from the first spray. The fragrance smiles at you. The ocean behind it does not.

The lady still stands upon the bluff, gazing out upon the sea; but as the fragrance blooms so does the realization that she meditates not upon Nature, but wonders how many wives will be made widows this night because their sailor husbands will not be returning home. Whether lost at sea, killed during the hunt for spermaceti, or having crashed upon the rocks, the vast expanse of the ocean terrifies as much as it seduces.  Lighthouses too, often the subjects of postcards and coffee table books, are there for a reason and it is not for beauty’s sake: they exist to save lives. The ocean is terrifyingly beautiful.   

There is another texture in this fragrance as well. Not a creamy, syrupy, or otherwise gourmand-inspired quality; not the characteristic salt and mineral nature of human skin; not the furry animalic of Myrrh and Tonka; but something altogether different. The orris, ambergris and driftwood, provide a velvety soft, perhaps even powdery texture to the fragrance.  Velvet = power, luxury. The mansions that the cliff walk skirt were the homes of the 19^th century robber barons: the Vanderbilts and the Astors, two of the most prominent families.  Part of what inspires the awe of these dwellings is that so few can become so immensely wealthy, while the very people who got them there, the poor, the working class, the laborers, so frequently have so little.   

And yet, even after all this, Atlante’s swansong sings of hope, not despair.  The final note, emerging only after the sea has retreated, the lady has retired for the evening, and the guests have departed the soiree, is as absurd as it is delightful. And while not listed in the notes, even on the Sarah Baker website, there is undeniably something incredibly sweet that takes center stage.  A bubble gum sweetness, soft and creamy enough to conjure memories of childhood, little league baseball games and scented Strawberry Shortcake toys. It pushes us not into a dark and dismal future, but to a bright and living past.

The strawberry doesn’t resolve the sublime — it transcends it. After all the darkness, all the grandeur, all the terror of the ocean and the inhumanity of the barons and the widows on the bluff — the fragrance ends in childhood. In innocence. In something so sweet and uncomplicated it borders on absurd given everything that preceded it. Not despite everything that came before. Because of it. The mermaid rises. The fragrance, having taken you to the edge of something vast and terrifying, returns you — briefly, tenderly — to something you had almost forgotten you knew how to feel.