Bois d'Ascèse 2012

Bois d'Ascèse by Naomi Goodsir
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7.8 / 10 311 Ratings
A popular perfume by Naomi Goodsir for women and men, released in 2012. The scent is smoky-woody. The longevity is above-average. It is still in production.
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Main accords

Smoky
Woody
Spicy
Resinous
Earthy

Fragrance Pyramid

Top Notes Top Notes
TobaccoTobacco WhiskyWhisky
Heart Notes Heart Notes
AmberAmber LabdanumLabdanum CinnamonCinnamon
Base Notes Base Notes
Smoked prickly cedarSmoked prickly cedar Somalian frankincenseSomalian frankincense OakmossOakmoss

Perfumer

Ratings
Scent
7.8311 Ratings
Longevity
8.5240 Ratings
Sillage
7.9244 Ratings
Bottle
7.3215 Ratings
Value for money
6.969 Ratings
Submitted by Kankuro, last update on 06.04.2024.

Reviews

11 in-depth fragrance descriptions
8
Sillage
9
Longevity
10
Scent
MossGreen

21 Reviews
Translated Show original Show translation
MossGreen
MossGreen
Top Review 19  
Freedom. And awareness of oneself
Now I can no longer avoid...I tigerte like a restless animal around the woody scents, looking desperately for something that brings the fire in me to blaze again.
Enthusiastically I found beautiful scents, disappointed they let me take distance again after a few days.
And yet the longed-for sample lay all the time in my small "Still testing" tin.

The description sounded interesting, as well as the comments, but I expected me not too much..smoke, resin and whiskey.... sounds cool, I test times.

Then it came on the skin, on a damp cold spring morning, which promised to be a warm day.
What's that? A campfire! Freshly lit with the highest quality wood, long and extensively dried, without smoke, birch! Burns wonderfully crackling and effective.
I love the smell of campfires, although I used to be ashamed to smell like a forest rascal and the jacket had to go in the wash.
However, as we all know, one matures into what one is to become one day and now I find myself again, blown away, taken with a smoky authentic woody scent....no ham and no smoked fish...fire! Wonderful campfire.
Wow.... taken with this lifelike visualization of an energetic event, I revelled in the scent, letting it overwhelm me and carry me back to times when life was still okay, you were shallowly tipsy, relaxed and overjoyed sharing beautiful moments and evenings with trusted people, with fire, warmth and freedom.

A GOOD keyword..freedom...if this had a smell, it would be Bois D'Ascèse. Wildness, exuberance, carefree and at the same time relaxed gentleness and generosity.
I wrapped myself in this fragrance for the first time before a day of work that promised to be quite exhausting. 10 hours in the open air, wrapped in crowds of people who want to be advised and noticed.
I could not have looked for a better companion.
Reliably supported me this wild and at the same time gentle brew and let me become the best I can be that day.
I gave away my wares to those who might need it and did not allow myself to be unsettled by those who spray venom around at every opportunity.
A suit of armor? Maybe... but I feel much more completed by this fragrance, as if it provided the support for the fire that is inherent in each of us. It is definitely in full harmony with mine.
The smoke retreated, leaving behind, instead of scorched earth, a fertile, spicy soil, habitat for woody plants and herbs of all kinds.
In this phase, the fragrance nestled against me like a second skin, merged with what I had experienced and intertwined with me to form a dignified figure that knows what it wants...how could I not understand this for all these years?
Self-awareness...in the deepest sense of the meaning of that word. Not ego, rather the awareness of who you are, where you want to go and what you want, what you want to put up with and what exceeds your limits.

The base is the most beautiful thing about this fragrance. Grounding, cleansing, warm and comforting.
Somehow, Bois d 'ascèse makes me think, take a step back and turn to myself.
It may be presumptuous to assign this yet quite powerful effect to a fragrance alone, and I'm not saying that he alone is responsible for it.
But sometimes people just need a little push, a tong on the scale, a drop that makes the barrel overflow, another arbitrary metaphor.....
And for me, Naomi Goodsir has done just that with this creation.

I usually keep myself quite factual in my comments, but here I leave this to more experienced noses and content myself with the description of my subjective impressions, which have touched me very much.
An erlebnisduft, which I do not wear, because I find him too bad for my disdainful everyday life. But the experience remains with me forever.
4 Comments
jtd

484 Reviews
jtd
jtd
Helpful Review 6  
why frankincense? what is niche?
Frankincense, it’s the new black.

Bois d’Ascese is a good, solid fragrance. It’s handsome. It smells like frankincense. I’ve smelled frankincense many times and love it. Most people do.

There’s the hazard.

Bois d’Ascese falls prey to the Amber Trap. Take a ‘ready-made’ botanical such as frankincense or labdanum (or rose, or vetiver...). Then build a fragrance around the central component by applying olfactory make-up. Enhance it. Detail it. Build a Greek chorus around it for christ’s sake. Just make sure it’s dead center and don’t stray off course. This style of sola-nota perfumery is conservative by definition. It’s what has lead every niche house to have an unmistakeable Amber which very often is nearly indistinguishable from any other house’s Amber

I can’t argue with the fragrance. It’s lovely and would be wonderful to smell on someone in passing. But to say that the perfumer has made frankincense beautiful is like saying that the make-up artist made Cary Grant handsome. I know that it puts perfumer Julien Rasquinet and designer Naomi Goodsir in the spotlight, but releasing a frankincense perfume in the niche perfumery market is not far conceptually from making a fresh aquatic for the mainstream men’s perfume market. I’ve never smelled, Cuir Velours, Goodsir’s other perfume, but the name alone leads me to a cynical frame of mind. I imagine the third fragrance will be an eponymous Oud, and following soon thereafter will be an Amber, a Musk and a nouveau Vanilla.

‘Niche’ can mean so many things. It can refer to an alternate strategy to the mainstreams, it can describe a sensibility, it can mean something particular that has spun off from the norm into its own little eddy. Naomi Goodsir convinces me that niche in perfumery means the same thing that ‘young’ and ‘modern’ mean in fashion--code for the most recent iteration of an easily identified item.

from scent hurdle.com
1 Comment
6
Bottle
8
Sillage
8
Longevity
8
Scent
CoS

5 Reviews
Translated Show original Show translation
CoS
CoS
5  
A touch of smokehouse
This fragrance starts right off with a fairly strong smoky note and tobacco. The smoked cedar juniper is quite dominant from the beginning and reminds of a smokehouse. Childhood memories of when my grandmother smoked her own meat come to mind. On the one hand a nice, pleasant and warm scent and then somehow a bit penetrating. The tobacco note from the opening also stays on my skin for a while, but makes the scent quite masculine and reminds me of Cuba I could hardly perceive the whiskey, just like the cinnamon, amber and labdanum. It was more like this: I had hardly felt a slightly sweet note in my nose when it had evaporated and was taken up again by the smoked scent. The dry down remains smoky, especially the smoked cedar juniper is in the foreground again. In the background the Somali incense resonates, very discreet.

The silage and shelf life is above average. The scent lasted a good 8 h on my skin with a good performance. Even the next morning there was still a slight note of dry down.

Although the fragrance is a unisex scent, I would describe it as rather heavy and masculine, due to the very smoky note and the tobacco. Also more for a man +30 who knows exactly what he wants and likes to stand out both with his personality and his scent. It is definitely more of a winter scent than a summer scent.
0 Comments
5
Bottle
7.5
Sillage
10
Longevity
8
Scent
Drseid

819 Reviews
Drseid
Drseid
4  
Looking For The Smell of a Campfire In A Bottle? Now You Have Found It...
Bois d'Ascese opens with a quick shot of straight-up whiskey before quickly transitioning to the key heart note of smoked cadewood incense (cadewood smells quite similar to cedar to my nose, at least). The scent is quite minimalist in its implementation, but the smoked cadewood is just about as close as you can get to standing right next to an active wood burning fireplace or campfire all ablaze. This is bone-dry and very, very smoky. While the official note list says one should expect cinnamon in the heart I confess I smell none. What *is* present to a minor degree is an underlying completely dry ashy tobacco note that supports the smoked cade through the dry-down with only a very subtle relatively dry amber adding just a hint of softness to the receding smoke at the very end of the scent's life-cycle. Projection is very good and longevity is exceptional.

Bois d'Ascese is a fine opening salvo from the house of Naomi Goodsir. It does not contain many notes and does not develop much staying linearly smoky throughout, but unlike so many smoky scents on the market that get the scent of real smoke wrong, this one is absolutely a reference scent when it comes to presenting what an actual wood burning fire smells like. I confess that smelling like a campfire is not really something one strives for on a daily basis (or at least not this reviewer), but given the right special occasion to shine Bois d'Ascese gets the job done with aplomb and is the first one I would reach for every time. I will not join the many folks that feel this is "fragrance of the year 2012," and the price point is more than a bit steep, but definitely consider me as highly impressed and eager to sample more from the house as new fragrances are released. Bois d'Ascese earns an excellent 4 out of 5 stars.
1 Comment
7
Bottle
9
Sillage
8
Longevity
7
Scent
Laurana77

13 Reviews
Laurana77
Laurana77
Helpful Review 2  
Campfire Smoke Meets Cedar & Leather
This was another of the luckyscent samples a loved one let me try, and it's one I chose to keep. On application, I got smoke, reminiscent of times around a campfire and the scent is like that of a log of pine or cedar wood that's been burnt into nearly black charcoal. It's a bit too smoky for me and I didn't apply much so a little goes a long way. This fragrance also brought me back in time to when I used to attend a women's circle for rituals around a fire out in the woods at night where we'd each apply pieces of birchwood, pieces of pine or cedar and also burnt incense. This fragrance definitely evokes a sense of that sacred space, of incense and smoke and meditation.

After the first hour, the scent became more leathery and brought back vivid memories of riding the motorcycle of a good friend where we'd both be wearing leather jackets. There's a spicy-amber mix that comes into play about a hour in and rounds off the fragrance. It's a scent to wear on a day like this one which is cool, damp and rainy, and overcast and where you're going to stay indoors curled up by the fireplace with a good book. I can't imagine wearing this when out with others, nor is it suited to the office due to its intense heady smokiness. It's definitely suited to wearing with a quality leather jacket as the loved one who'd given me this in the luckyscent sample commented when I was wearing it the other day.

This is definitely a fragrance for lovers of smokiness and cedar, and it brings to mind sitting around the campfire with friends, pieces of cedar wood being added to keep you warm, and watching the sparks flying up against the darkening evening sky. It's a very evocative fragrance and if you have any memories of campfires when younger or of wearing leather whilst riding a motorcycle, this will vividly bring those memories back to you.

The sillage is moderate with it becoming a skin scent more rapidly than I'd anticipated. The projection is quite good, though, and it's easy to underestimate this because once applied your nose quickly adapts to the fragrance so it's best to apply a little at a time. Whilst as a woman I find this quite nice, I prefer to layer it with my Clarin's Eau Dynamisante EDT just to take the edge off the smokiness and to give it a lighter note. That way, too, I'm able to wear it out and people have enjoyed the mix whilst this fragrance on its own often come across as a bit too strongly smoky. However, I'm sure some people prefer not to 'dilute' it in any way and just wear it by itself.
0 Comments
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Statements

5 short views on the fragrance
BoBoChampBoBoChamp 4 years ago
7
Sillage
8
Longevity
7.5
Scent
A slightly boozy smoky-woody Winter fragrance, balanced by a gentlier spicy earthy-woody base. Male-oriented. Keep sprays to a minimum!
0 Comments
HermeshHermesh 9 years ago
5
Bottle
7.5
Sillage
10
Longevity
9
Scent
Unique smoky scent. Not kind of church incense, but rather burning autumn leaves and pine needles. The base is beautifully warm!
0 Comments
SayreBeaSayreBea 2 months ago
7
Bottle
7
Sillage
8
Longevity
8.5
Scent
Masculine. Smokey. Great performance and projection. Not at all boozy on my skin.
0 Comments
ZerkaloZerkalo 1 year ago
9
Bottle
8
Sillage
8
Longevity
8.5
Scent
Smoke bears no irreconcilable contradictions. It lingers high in the air - like a revelation - to prove all existence is finitude.
0 Comments
SamuelGustavSamuelGustav 6 years ago
The perfect fireplace feeling
0 Comments

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