KingPin

Not for the novice. The first hours it is the scent of of Count Dracula, slowly moving through a cellar cemetery in an abandoned castle at midnight. Silvery moonlight through iron gated ceiling windows, tiny, sad irises observable in the windows edge. Dirt and old molding leaves on the ground. He stops moving, only his scent still lingers in the air.

After two hours we are still in his castle, but he has left the basement for the main hall. Abandoned, with a broken roof, silent rain drips from the night sky above. Now perhaps Count Dracula's nephew can wear the perfume, it has morphed into a younger dirty and ice cold iris smell.

After yet another two hours we go outside into an oak forest. The sun finally rises, but is covered by a wet, grey fog. It gives eerie shodows on the path we walk. As we continue through the cold, damp, mossy forest we still se irises peeking in the shadows. Finally I can wear the scent, it is now the perfume of a mere mortal. If you wear a cape.

Impossible to rate.

When I was about ten/eleven years old in the early 80-ies I was living on the coast of the Swedish archipelago. Our greatest adventure was going alone with friends on the train to Stockholm. It is only 45 minutes, but it felt like a faraway trip to another world. You had no cellphones in those days, so you were truly on your own. The trains were old, probably over 20 years, in brown metal with wooden panels inside, and a bordeaux/dark grey striped velvety padding on the very upright seats. We usually did these trips in summer, so the windows were down so that you could catch the breeze in the otherwise steaming carriages.

The trains were as mentioned very old, and were built for transport, not comfort. The brakes were metal-on-metal, so the breaking was a screechy affair. As the train braked on these dusty summer days there was a distinct smell of burnt metal and dust. As smell of the iron in blood, smoke, gravel dust and cold steel. This is the EXACT opening scent of “Dry Wood”, combined with a bit of bay leaf (after an initial flash of citrus).

After about an hour or two the bay leaf takes over with hints of fresh pepper. Interestingly enough, in Sweden you use bay leaf in the water when boiling hot dogs, so my trip goes from train adventures to sailing camp in the archipelago. Boiled hotdogs were a staple lunch for the crews, hungry as wolves after hours on the sea, and the bay leaf scent was a blessing since it signified an upcoming feast of hot dogs in bread with ketchup and mustard.

Even though I thoroughly enjoyed these trips down memory lane, I must admit that smelling like train breaks and hot dog water with pepper is probably not going to be my signature scent.

I think a more adequate name for this perfume would be “Tondre la Pelouse”. I don’t know what route Mr Vuitton was thinking of, but I have a hard time thinking that you can find a road that starts with a single exquisite lemon tree and a very small, very fresh pepper bush followed by endless fields of dewy newly groomed British grass lawns. My travels along this route was “Wow, I want to go this way forever!” for the first ten minutes to “Could you please stop mowing the lawn!?” for the remainder of the trip. After six hours, when you arrive at your final destination, the lawn mowers finally stop. There is a very distant forest of Peru Balsam when you exit your vehicle, which is a pleasant, very (!) close to the skin, resting spot.

Super classy linear bergamot/iris/vetiver. Superbly balanced and you certainly notice that only the highest class raw materials are used. Some resemblance with Voyage d,Hermès, but where the pepper is toned down in lieu of vetiver, which in my mind gives a more harmonious balance. Exquisite, refined and pure class.

I must highly reluctantly admit that I really like this scent. My teen daughter wanted a Victoria’s Secret scent for Christmas, and since I’m interested in perfumes I thought I’d go have a look, even though I have an instinctive aversion to Big Brand Perfume. I think I smelled every perfume they had in the store - it was superfruity this and megaflowery that. Until I tried this one. Yes, it was flowery and fruity like the rest, but it also had a clean freshness and a top-notch citrus tone that toned down the fruity flower potpourri. Whenever my daughter wears it and passes me, I notice that she smells fresh and pleasant in a quite sophisticated - but still young - way for being a teen girl. I would certainly recommend this to young women, maybe up to 25 years of age. A note is that I find the name a very good one for a perfume, but for this one it is highly misleading – a better name would be Fresh & Pleasant (which sucks as a name, but would be more informative).