Fragrance Reviews

Maison Incens: Green Aoud, Sweet Tobacco and Other Nice Things

05/17/15 05:40:15 

by: Serguey Borisov

Atrbazan.com          The Perfume Refrence

Eight months after the interview with Philippe Constantin, art director and owner ofMaison Incens, I finally managed to find those perfumes and try them all thoroughly. Now we can try to pull the perfumes out of the gloom of ignorance and review them. Ironically, there's nothing about the Maison Incens house but our interview, so I will omit long fabulous passages about a fictional heroes living in The Artganis Empire and will immediately turn to the unusual imaginative perfumes.

Let's start with Figue Aoudii. As the name implies, we should expect some unusual combination of green fig leaves, maybe fig fruits, and oriental woody fragrance. And so it is—the fragrance starts with a fresh breeze of summer fig groves, a beautiful smell full of happiness. Pretty quickly in the crisp summer greenery one can distinguish bright and cheerful floral notes (orange blossom, ylang-ylang, jasmine), which are reminiscent of the colorful dresses which graduates wear only one day in their lives. These dresses should look solemn and happy, as cheerful bright spots that attract attention for a second.

Then, among the flowers and transparent fig greenery sneaks some warm and woody note of ionones, which together with the green-leather mate absolute may be smelled as overripe figs. But the evaluator of the Maison Incens project, Irina Jourikhina from Paris, assures that "Figue Aoudii was created and approved as the luxurious and decadent Violet perfume."

Maison Incens Figue Aoudii
Top notes: Bergamot, Fleur d'orange;
Heart notes: Figue, Ylang-ylang, Violet, Orris, Leather, Cedarwood;
Base notes: Oud, Sandalwood, Amber, Animal accord, Musk.

This floral, creamy and slightly sweet powdery dance makes me a bit dizzy. Violet is the part of the perfume after which it starts to slide into warm drydown. There are sweet ambery, smoky and woody notes, and the oud accord that seems here like smoked worn leather, wild and handsome.

Thus, Figue Aoudii is like a scale, on one side of which funny and beautifully young graduates are jumping, and on the other side we can see the smiling face of a frank, seductive and a little fatigued adult woman in a shabby leather motorcycle jacket and jeans. Flowers and all the life celebrations are just in between, all of life. Incense and oud are already burning somewhere in the church, someone is baptized and someone gets a burial service. Every Maison Incens perfume has different resinous smoke notes ... there's the transparent incense and worn amber-oud, and even birch tar.

Beautiful floral fragrance Figue Aoudii is a good example of the uncommon combination of green fig leaves and an oriental oud base being connected by floral notes. Jean-Claude Gigodot remembered the green-oriental contrast—no wonder that another green-oud creation, Neroli Oud EDP by Au Pays de la Fleur d'Oranger, appeared in March 2015, created by the same perfumer, at the Esxence exhibition. The green part of the new perfume is made from neroli and petitgrain together with orange blossom, and the sweet animalic oud-y part is more obviously expressed.

Maison Incens Tabac Licorii
Top notes: Star Anise, Licorice;
Heart notes: Tobacco, Violet;
Base notes: Water accord, Animal notes, Musks.

Tabac Licorii is another strange and provocative perfume from the Maison Incens collection. Had it been Tabac Vanilii, no questions would even have been asked! So many different perfume houses are trying to monetize the current popularity of the vanilla and tobacco accord, and it is easy to find the needed legend of the Artganis Empire about. But we should encourage originality, not copycats. The sweet anise-licorice initial note reminds me of the cold murky Pastis on ice—for you it could recall the end of a meal in an Indian restaurant, or Yohji Pour Homme, or those strange black-colored sweets, or even cough syrup. Many people don`t like the cloying accord due to its medicinal link to childhood illness. But we should move on and develop our tastes—its flavor exists in other and more pleasant smell manifestations. When the licorice note goes away, it seemed that the perfume was gone completely, but it's true only to others, not the wearer. Only the outer shell of sweet Tabac Licorii disappears. The woody fougère base lives on the skin and clothing for a long time, though close enough to the body. The remaining tobacco smell is very dry, tart and bitter—not flavored pipe tobacco, but humid cigar or cigarette tobacco, with a hint of tonka beans. The main thing is that the fragrance is not pungent and stubborn, like many other tobacco perfumes in which the note is deliberately reinforced and underlined. It just asks for a lighter to burn. Tabac Licorii will be great on a man coming from the frost!

And briefly about the other Maison Incens perfumes.

Summer innocent green tuberose Figue Eleii doesn`t need any reviews—almost every young girl will choose it as long as tuberose and fig leaves are not banned in perfumery. Cuir Erindil is a soft and thin easy-wearing purple leather perfume with sandalwood and frankincense smoke. Animal magnetism is manifested in Musc Kaliriiperfume—its mesmerizing carnivorous flowers could catch and eat small birds, squirrels, and dogs. Men should be careful!

All Maison Incens fragrances have a haze from resinous incense (Musc Kalirii) to a thin orris cloud (Figue Eleii). The Artganis Empire should remain hidden from the people behind the veil of incense smoke.