Aqua Vitae Maison Francis Kurkdjian 2013

After the concert, we stood on crunching gravel around high tables draped in white covers, sipping somewhat warm Chardonnay. Next to us stood a man my age - slim, but not athletic, wearing expensive suede loafers, a Saint Laurent-esque intellectual glasses, and wavy, shoulder-length hair that he kept pushing behind his ears, while his equally expensive watch was hard to ignore. To top it off, he wore - the most dreadful of all horrors - one of those lightweight cashmere-silk scarves for men that you can buy in the store with the orange bags starting at five hundred euros.

Men in such silk scarves are never named Rüdiger or Kai-Uwe - that would be too banal (and no one can pronounce it in Portland's or Belgrade's burgeoning street art scene) - so we named our scarf-wearer Hervé. At some point, Hervé's phone rang, he set his somewhat warm Chardonnay down on the white-covered table and hissed reluctantly: 'Yes, what is it?' Thirty seconds of half-hearted murmuring, an annoyed glance at the Jaeger Le Coultre, then: 'Twenty thousand? No, tell him eighteen, and that's it!' A charming glance around, wavy hair pushed behind his ear. 'Please excuse me.'

Nothing about men like Hervé - often involved in cultural management or publishing, and 'on the go' a scarf like that can sometimes be quite practical - is average, nor should it be average. While many of them do wear Terre d'Hermès - of course bought at the store with the orange bags and not at Karstadt - they would much rather wear strictly limited creations that were available for only four weeks - by invitation only! - in a guerrilla store in Tokyo. If that’s not available, and Terre d'Hermès becomes too mundane, a fragrance from Kurkdjian will do in a pinch - especially since the name is so beautifully difficult to spell.

Francis Kurkdjian's Aqua Vitae is a fragrance that wishes it were more complicated than it actually is - a bit like our Hervé in the patterned silk scarf. It starts harmlessly citrusy light (Hervé immediately notices the tension between Calabrian and Sicilian aromas) and follows the top note with something loosely warm that oddly hovers between cool and warm (Hervé believes he recognizes a metaphor for Adorno) - as if the Hedione, Tonka, and Guaiac wood were being dimmed a bit. It is not hot, not cold, not fresh, not spicy, and not artificially clean, yet frustratingly timid - and not a life water.

Conclusion: not a bad fragrance. Perhaps a mistake in expectation management, as more is always expected from a Kurkdjian than just 'not bad.' Even Hervé is not quite sure if he will stick with Aqua Vitae. He pushes his wavy hair behind his ear, adjusts the bright silk scarf, and resolves to think about it later while listening to Belgian trip-hop.