Musc Pétille | Peach & Musk Extrait de Parfum (Contrapposto)

Contrapposto launched in 2023 as a Los Angeles aesthetic dermatology practice from husbands Nick Axelrod-Welk (who co-founded Into The Gloss and Nécessaire) and Casey Axelrod-Welk. Its very first consumer products are three breathtakingly gorgeous extraits de parfum. The brief to master perfumers Frank Voelkl and Shyamala Maisondieu was to create fragrances that melt into and enhance skin rather than sitting on top of it. Each 50 ml bottle comes ensconced delicately within a 416-page custom art book designed by Brian Roettinger, who also concepted the incredible custom glass flacons. They’re $350 each, but they feel and wear like it. Melting Flowers is a creamy white floral comprised of nectarine, jasmine, and gardenia over skin musks. Lubanite goes more mineral and marine, with olibanum and ambergris. Both are beautiful.

But Musc Pétille, French for “sparkling musk,” is the perfume I can’t stop wearing. It opens with a fizz of bitter orange and pink pepper bubbling up like the first sip of something cold, with ambrette lending a slightly sweet, skin-warm muskiness right away. Then a ripe peach nectar settles in. This I`s not the syrupy peach of a fruity fragrance, but something closer to fruit eaten voraciously standing over the sink, feeling the peach fuzz against your lips. Magnolia keeps it airy and there’s a clean, woody hum floating underneath. The drydown is sandalwood, cypriol, and the kind of soft, clean musks that remind me of the best of ’90s minimalism. Hours in, it smells like really sexy skin, which is exactly the point.