Armani Privé - Cuir Améthyste Giorgio Armani 2005

Morticia Addams wears this fragrance! The turpentine grabs your larynx and sends your sinuses to Arizona. Do not adjust your set! Eventually it settles into being different and the same. Disconcerting. Who are you? Crack the leather whip and tame it. Have a jelly bean with your tanned hide. Vanilla and leather? Don't try to understand it. There's a bitter screaming violet that merges with the birch tar in the top notes that would unnerve the rolling stones. Unconditional love is what it wants. Run with the foxes and hunt with the hounds. Sillage is fumey, unearthly. Projection is not huge but everyone will know you are wearing perfume. Its stickability is prodigious. The hounds will find their fox. Psychedlic. Maybe it's me after all.

Cuir Amethyste has been re-released in a different container than the original quartz topped kobe wood re-usable vessel. Anecdotally I hear the perfume is the same.
Cuir Amethyste is in my top 5 of all time.

Criticism of Cuir Amethyste appears to have taken two routes. 1) It’s luxurious and lush and I love it. 2) It’s synthetic and cheap and I don’t like it. I’ll take one from column A and one from column B. It does have a roughness that suggests that the details weren’t as important as both the distinctiveness and in-your-faceness. And from the flower to the fruit to the leather/vinyl/plastic notes (the “cuir”, I guess) there is chemical twang that most would call instinctively call synthetic. The topnotes of CA always give me the same gestalt: grape/violet/ink. A sort of Bois de Violette on meth.

So, yes, from column A I’ll take the chemo-freak factor, but from column B I’ll take the, “I like it!”

What’s compelling though is the disjointed narrative it gives you. The stages of CA over time don’t line up. The topnotes shouldn’t logically lead to the heartnotes, and you end up in a drydown that leaves you wondering how you got there. Some of the notes, the flavors, last from start to finish---sweet yet juiceless fruit; powdery, woody floral; plastic-ink.---but the tone is all over the map. The topnotes are high-pitched yet dense, the heart is powdery and resinous-sweet, the base is fairly woody but with some of that inky sweetness remaining. Moving from one phase to the next is less confusing than just nonsensical. Any moment of the fragrance can be likeable, but to the wearer, who’s there for the whole ride, in feels incorrect. Not distressing or off-putting, just objectively incorrect like a misspelling.

But wrong can be more fun than right, so I’m coming down in favor of incorrectness. Is it that the perfumer tried for leather and then got ink? Is it that Armani just had to have “cuir” in the title? Was Almairac looking for that cool inky effect as in Comme des Garcons 2 Woman? (If so, he got it.) Since so many perfumes get it right I take it that leather isn’t a terribly difficult note to achieve in perfumery. So I choose to believe that the perfumer was aiming for a fun, fake, fantasy leather along the lines of Etat Libre’s Vierges et Toreros or Parfumerie Generale’s Psychotrope. This perfume should be presented as a well-executed oddball. Cuir Amethyste is more of a fun perfume than serious one and seems out of place in the Armani world of grim luxury. The name, the packaging, the imagery all suggest numb sparsity, high fashion’s proxy for serenity. Put this stuff in something like Juicy Couture’s spangle bottle, call it, “Violet Vinyl”, charge ¼ the price (you’d make your profit on volume) and it’d sell like mad.

This is a very compelling and unusual take on leather, and on violet.

In the opening, there is rose and spice -- this is but momentary.

The leather note rises quickly. It serves to ground and deepen the violet and the light patchouli notes of the heart.

The base, called a vanilla bourbon by Armani, presents just as one would expect of benzoin and vanilla. But there is an incensy note here, and a sweet, slightly woody leathery note as well, likely provided by the labdanum.

Those who do not care for the candied "violet pastilles" note so often found in violet-centered fragrances should try Cuir Améthyste in order to experience the more interesting possibilities of violet.

Cuir Amethyste is a very unique and exotic scent in my opinion.

Opens with coriander and a metallic rose note, which remains for a while.

Then joins the violet and birch, but i think there's too much violet at this phase. A little unbalanced in my opinion.

The drydown is somewhat ambery and a little sweet.

Longevity is great, around 8 hours. Projection and sillage are good also.

Updated September 2013

On a humid day in small-town Texas, a plump and slightly sweaty college student home for the summer enters the air-conditioned diner wearing a mini-skirt. The sweat on her legs mingles with the well-worn vinyl booth she sits in. She pops a violet pastille to make sure her breath is fresh before her friend gets there. Her friend arrives to have lunch with her and slides into the booth across from her. He works at the sawmill in town and emits a pleasant scent of freshly sawed boards.

Then Michel Almairac captures their scent, and Armani sells it for a lot of money!