Autumn is the perfect time to wear a chypre perfume. Something in a chypre’s mossy, musty base echoes leaf mold and feels right at home on days with cold mornings and sunny afternoons. Among chypres, fruity chypres are especially nice. The fruit adds sweetness and color — so nice on a rainy day — without going all pumpkin spice.
Here are five fruity chypres to sample:
Guerlain Mitsouko: I’ll kick off the list with the queen of fruity chypres…
French niche line Parfum d’Empire will launch Le Cri de la Lumière, a new fragrance inspired by light…
To give you a thoughtful top ten for fall, I went to the experts: Tracy and André at Fumerie. Both of them used to work at Portland’s Perfume House and amassed years of experience with the classics. Then, seven months ago, Tracy opened Fumerie to focus on niche fragrances, and André joined her.
To give you an idea of their tastes in fragrance, Tracy has a tattoo on her forearm of her favorite perfume notes: patchouli, hay, tobacco, cocoa, and leather. When she thinks of fall, she thinks of comforting scents that remind her of riding her horse as a teenager through the leaves, and the smells of Oregon’s crisp autumn air, sweet alfalfa, saddle leather, grain and the horse itself.
André loves vintage fragrances and has a nose for classically constructed perfumes…
When I hear that something is a leather fragrance, almost always my first thought is, what kind? Leathers can be as oily and potent as a motorcycle gang’s garage hangout, or tender and soft as a well-used chamois. They can be salty or sweet. Sometimes the leather blends so well with the rest of the fragrance that it’s barely discernible, and sometimes it wallops you straight from the bottle.
Parfum d’Empire Cuir Ottoman is a rich, comfortable leather with a soft but durable texture. If it were a leather article, it would be a saddle leather handbag you buy for its practicality, not glamour — despite how expensive it is — then wear so often that it becomes a part of you…
Tabac Tabou is the latest from French niche line Parfum d’Empire. It’s sort of limited edition — the brand says it will be produced yearly in limited quantities, with the year of production listed on the label.
Tabac Tabou was high on my “can’t wait to sample” list, not least because I so loved the fairly recent Azemour Les Orangers and Corsica Furiosa (the fragrance released between those two, Musc Tonkin, I admittedly didn’t much care about either way). Plus: tobacco, narcissus, fresh hay, honey? That sounds most excellent, in fact, it sounded so excellent to me that I’ll repeat the description, originally from Luckyscent:
In Tabac Tabou, the tobacco leaf arrives folded in whiffs of fresh hay and wild landscape, rich and utterly untamed…