Snuff Elsa Schiaparelli 1977 Eau de Toilette

Snuff as a noun means snuff tobacco in English, but as a verb, it has various, somewhat frightening meanings.... To snuff someone, for example, means to kill someone.... No, this scent is certainly not a killer, nor a big coup, but it does stand out in an interesting way from the rather common men's leather fragrances of the late 70s.

Compared to the heavier, warm leather scents like Léonard Pour Homme or Ted Lapidus TL Homme, Snuff is rather cool and lightly metallic, although the leather note is undeniable. One could describe it as a summery leather scent :-)

Snuff starts off herbal-green and has a floral-woody heart with a very harmonious pine-patchouli wave. At Schiaparelli, the leather accord was not mixed with heaps of additional animalistic base notes (the amber accord mentioned in the pyramid is perceived very faintly), but rather focused on resins and moss.

Whether the scent in its original version was similar to the reformulation from 1977, I cannot say, but I believe I read somewhere that it originally corresponded more to a tobacco note than a leather note. It was stylishly sold as a Gentlemen's Perfume in a glass pipe, with a Bakelite cap shaped like a mouthpiece, all beautifully nestled in a wooden box. :-)

The newer version was offered in a tailored bottle typical for Schiaparelli fragrances, the EdT in brown glass, the After Shave in green glass. For the EdT splash, the bottle cap was a silver-colored plastic pipe.

Unfortunately, Snuff is no longer produced, which is a shame....