"Nasomatto" is Italian for "crazy nose". The perfumer Alessandro Gualtieri earned the nickname for his taste in strange materials and daring formulas, then made it a brand. He founded the house in Amsterdam in 2007.
Two years later came the release that made it famous. Black Afgano, launched in 2009, set out to evoke the smell of high-grade hashish. Dark resins, tobacco, coffee, incense and oud sit over a green, smoky opening, sold as a concentrated extrait in a small 30ml bottle. Through the 2010s it became one of the defining cult fragrances of its generation, the one people whispered about and struggled to find.
A word on the hashish, because the question always comes. It is an accord, a smell built from entirely legal aroma materials. Nothing illicit goes anywhere near the bottle. What you get is the idea of the thing, that dark, sticky, smoked-honey character, without any of the substance.
Gualtieri never settled down. In 2015 he opened a sister house, Orto Parisi, as a home for ideas rawer than even Nasomatto would carry, and the two labels now run side by side. That tells you how he works. The provocation is not a marketing angle. It is the whole method.
We have written the full Black Afgano story separately. If you want the scent itself without the collector prices, Noir Mystique is our take on Black Afgano, a UK-made 35% extrait spray, found in our Nasomatto-inspired collection.
