Bertrand Duchaufour: 28 posts

by Suzanna

Some of the most intriguing fragrances are meant to evoke environment and emotion, time and place. This is why the newest L’Artisan Parfumeur fragrance, Séville à l’aube, caught my attention. Perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour created Séville à l’aube as a celebration of journalist and perfume blogger Denyse Beaulieu’s remembrance of romance and seduction past. The idea stemmed from a story Beaulieu told the perfumer about an erotic event that transpired during a long-ago Holy Week (this turns up in the scent as an abstraction) and about the smells and associations of that time and place (more literal). Beaulieu describes her experience in the creation of this fragrance in her book The Perfume Lover. Duchaufour documents Beaulieu’s story as an “orange blossom Oriental” in which the sweet and honeyed white flower appears meaty and succulent and the dry resins of the base curl upwards in the manner of incense.

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by Suzanna

Aedes de Venustas is the hip West Village fragrance boutique that since 1995 has been a Mecca for the connoisseur of niche perfumes.  The Aedes brand roster includes both the popular and the polarizing; there are scents that smell of flower stalls and scents that smell of olives and damp cobblestones.  The shop also carries bath and body products, home fragrance, and candles like the ultra-covetable Mizensir Sapin de Noël.

The boutique now has its own house fragrance, the eponymous Aedes de Venustas Signature eau de parfum authored by Bertrand Duchaufour, he of the upcoming L’Artisan Séville à l’aube and the nose behind the wildly creative Eau d’Italie Sienne l’Hiver and cult favorites Avignon and Kyoto for Comme des Garçons. Aedes de Venustas signature is Duchaufour’s second scent for the boutique; the first was released under the L’Artisan brand and has no relation to the new Signature scent.

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Star rating: 5 stars–outstanding/potential classic, 4 stars–very good, 3 stars–adequate, 2 stars–disappointing, 1 star–poor.

As I wrote in Running with the Boys, some fragrance types seem so quintessentially masculine that I find it hard to wear them. The fougère style fragrances combine herbal notes with the rich sweetness of amber, tonka bean and musk and are among the most classical of masculine perfumes (think Calvin Klein Eternity for Men!) I have used words like virile, burly and hair-chested to describe this genre, but it is a gross generalization. Manly though this style is, it can also be elegant and polished. I only need to reach for Tom Ford Lavender Palm and Penhaligon’s Sartorial to find two recent examples.

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Star rating: 5 stars–outstanding/potential classic, 4 stars–very good, 3 stars–adequate, 2 stars–disappointing, 1 star–poor.

Where is the exhilaration and intoxication? Where is the delicious darkness of a fine aged liquor? Where is the opulence typical of ambers and woods? For a fragrance that comes from a venerable cognac producer, Frapin 1697 seems like a particularly disappointing offering. It delivers none of darkness and richness one might expect from an amber oriental liberally dosed with rum notes and instead falls apart into musk and sour fruit. If it were a cocktail, I would have asked the bartender to remix it.

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Star rating: 5 stars–outstanding/potential classic, 4 stars–very good, 3 stars–adequate, 2 stars–disappointing, 1 star–poor.

Vanilla, rum, tobacco, woods… Was Bertrand Duchaufour trying to follow in the footsteps of Molinard Habanita with his Havana Vanille created for L’Artisan Parfumeur. If so, the references are vague at best, and Havana Vanille (recently renamed Vanille Absolument to avoid a trademark infringement) is a composition that toys with the fantasy of an oriental bazaar much more than with the decadent glamor of Havana.

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