Put aside the marketing for a minute - no, I Am Trash (or Les Fleurs du Déchet) does not smell like trash! Etat Libre d’Orange is a brand known for making high concept art, and this is no exception. In I Am Trash, the idea is to raise awareness about the continued usefulness of the things that normally get thrown away, and find a way to upcycle these items to create something beautiful in its own right.
I Am Trash is a perfume made entirely from ‘found objects’ like the fruit peels and wood chips leftover from extraction by the perfume or food industry. This makes perfect sense. After all, some of the most exquisite materials in perfumery derive from waste. Ambergris, for example, is effluvia from a whale washed up on a beach. Oud is a tree’s white cell response to a fungal infection. And so on and so forth.
But fear not, for I Am Trash is as far from the ruder, dirtier aspects of nature’s waste as you can imagine. It is a gentle fruity-floral that wraps a woodland bouquet of wild strawberries, apple, rose, and citrus rind up in a frothy musk and asks you to forgive it its dramatic back story. Nothing dark or rotting lurks in the corners. This is a purely bright, sunny concoction of fruits and flowers, with clean musks, radiant Iso E Super, and a dab of creamy sandalwood in the base pinning it all together. Etat Libre d’Orange could have named this I Am Joy and nobody would blink. But we love the name I Am Trash because it’s a reminder to be more thoughtful about what we throw away, and testament to the fact that, sometimes, out of trash comes true beauty.
Bitter orange, apple, lemongrass, tangerine, rose, Iso E Super, wild strawberry, Atlas cedar, Sandalore, Akigalawood
Perfume rating 3.81 out of 5 on Fragrantica