Terre d'Hermès Hermès 2006 Eau de Toilette

As children my brothers and I often tried to create sparks with flints. In some places these glassy chunks are easy to find and to identify for children, so we took two of these stones and hit them against each other. As I know by now, our flaring was doomed to failure from the beginning, you need pyrite or steel for beautiful, glowing sparks as a second flint. Instead of blazing flames we only got sharp-edged fragments and a strange smell in the air. Mineral, strange, a little bit biting and absolutely inimitable.

This flint-stone smell is for me the magic of Terre d'Hermès. As soon as the citrus notes fade away, the flint spreads and, together with the vetiver, creates a wonderfully mineral, spicy fragrance with a lot of depth. Yet it remains fresh and light throughout, instead of getting lost in its earthiness. The scents are perfectly coordinated and you can smell individual notes well. Even if it is more of an autumn or winter scent for me, you can wear it the whole year round with confidence.

Hermès has also thought about the design: the dark brown and orange of the packaging are a perfect match for this fragrance, especially or precisely because they are also the colours of flint. The clarity and lightness of the fragrance is again reflected in the transparent bottle and the subtle hue of the contents.

It seems to polarize if you compare the overall rating with some comments in the forum, but for me Terre d'Hermès is an absolute classic.

A timeless fragrance that will always remind me nostalgically of youthful pyromania