NARCISO EAU DE TOILETTE
By NARCISO RODRIGUEZ
ingredients: rose, musk, cedarwood
I am partial to lactonic giants like Dioressence, Opium, and Rush, and always feel a brief flash of elation when I smell one, even before I get what is happening. Perhaps it is because lactones are the perfumery equivalent of masonry, helping to build structures you feel you could lean against or walk around in. Perhaps it is because they always seem to contain a germ of dryness within to offset the milky warmth and act as a sort of crystal seed from which a balanced composition expands naturally. Perhaps also because they remind me of my adolescence which, naturally, must have been the golden age of perfumery.
Aurélien Guichard, son of the great Jean Guichard and a terrific perfumer in his own right, is fond of them; witness his use of lactones in masterpieces like Chinatown [2005] and the Narciso [2014] parent to this one. What Guichard brings to his best compositions is a combination of power and elegance which seems to be the fiefdom of the best French perfumers. They manage to imply—possibly using knowledge handed down in ways that mere schools never access—that the novel somehow follows logically from the traditional.
Guichard’s fragrances put me in mind of the way Aston Martins have changed over the years, all visibly related like an evolving species. To be sure, James Bond’s narrow-gauge DB5 was a marvel. But the wider, lower, meaner recent ones are true heartbreakers. Similarly, Chinatown and Narciso EDT may borrow their internal orchestration from classical green chypre structures like Y [1964] and Givenchy III [1970], a richly intricate dry rustling that says perfume like no other. But they have shed a certain primness, fondly remembered but now dated, and no longer stoop to hide their handsome frame.
Narciso Eau de Toilette’s tune is boldly confident from the very first, and continues to please all the way into a long-lasting drydown which, unusually, contains a note of tar, perhaps to remind us that this would also make an excellent masculine.
smoky sweetness
