Toskovat

Toskovat is a Romanian ultra-niche fragrance house founded during the pandemic by David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi  a former film student who couldn't make films and needed a different medium for his stories. He found perfumery. The name comes from the Russian "toska": an untranslatable spiritual longing, a dull ache that has no specific cause. That feeling is the house's entire brief.

The fragrances are called things like Inexcusable Evil, Anarchist A_, Amaretto in the Melting Room, and Born Screaming. They are not crowd-pleasers. They are memory triggers, emotional provocations, small film scripts rendered in molecules. Zoologist, Imaginary Authors, and Filippo Sorcinelli are the obvious reference points  houses where concept and craft are genuinely inseparable.

Toskovat has been featured in Vogue and the Wall Street Journal. It remains, genuinely, a cult brand: difficult to explain, impossible to forget once you've encountered it.