Top Notes 
Tobacco
Whisky
Heart Notes 
Labdanum
Amber
Cinnamon
Base Notes 
Smoked prickly cedar
Somalian frankincense
Oakmoss
05/20/2013
jtd
484 Reviews
jtd
Helpful Review
6
why frankincense? what is niche?
Frankincense, it’s the new black.
Bois d’Ascese is a good, solid fragrance. It’s handsome. It smells like frankincense. I’ve smelled frankincense many times and love it. Most people do.
There’s the hazard.
Bois d’Ascese falls prey to the Amber Trap. Take a ‘ready-made’ botanical such as frankincense or labdanum (or rose, or vetiver...). Then build a fragrance around the central component by applying olfactory make-up. Enhance it. Detail it. Build a Greek chorus around it for christ’s sake. Just make sure it’s dead center and don’t stray off course. This style of sola-nota perfumery is conservative by definition. It’s what has lead every niche house to have an unmistakeable Amber which very often is nearly indistinguishable from any other house’s Amber
I can’t argue with the fragrance. It’s lovely and would be wonderful to smell on someone in passing. But to say that the perfumer has made frankincense beautiful is like saying that the make-up artist made Cary Grant handsome. I know that it puts perfumer Julien Rasquinet and designer Naomi Goodsir in the spotlight, but releasing a frankincense perfume in the niche perfumery market is not far conceptually from making a fresh aquatic for the mainstream men’s perfume market. I’ve never smelled, Cuir Velours, Goodsir’s other perfume, but the name alone leads me to a cynical frame of mind. I imagine the third fragrance will be an eponymous Oud, and following soon thereafter will be an Amber, a Musk and a nouveau Vanilla.
‘Niche’ can mean so many things. It can refer to an alternate strategy to the mainstreams, it can describe a sensibility, it can mean something particular that has spun off from the norm into its own little eddy. Naomi Goodsir convinces me that niche in perfumery means the same thing that ‘young’ and ‘modern’ mean in fashion--code for the most recent iteration of an easily identified item.
from scent hurdle.com
Bois d’Ascese is a good, solid fragrance. It’s handsome. It smells like frankincense. I’ve smelled frankincense many times and love it. Most people do.
There’s the hazard.
Bois d’Ascese falls prey to the Amber Trap. Take a ‘ready-made’ botanical such as frankincense or labdanum (or rose, or vetiver...). Then build a fragrance around the central component by applying olfactory make-up. Enhance it. Detail it. Build a Greek chorus around it for christ’s sake. Just make sure it’s dead center and don’t stray off course. This style of sola-nota perfumery is conservative by definition. It’s what has lead every niche house to have an unmistakeable Amber which very often is nearly indistinguishable from any other house’s Amber
I can’t argue with the fragrance. It’s lovely and would be wonderful to smell on someone in passing. But to say that the perfumer has made frankincense beautiful is like saying that the make-up artist made Cary Grant handsome. I know that it puts perfumer Julien Rasquinet and designer Naomi Goodsir in the spotlight, but releasing a frankincense perfume in the niche perfumery market is not far conceptually from making a fresh aquatic for the mainstream men’s perfume market. I’ve never smelled, Cuir Velours, Goodsir’s other perfume, but the name alone leads me to a cynical frame of mind. I imagine the third fragrance will be an eponymous Oud, and following soon thereafter will be an Amber, a Musk and a nouveau Vanilla.
‘Niche’ can mean so many things. It can refer to an alternate strategy to the mainstreams, it can describe a sensibility, it can mean something particular that has spun off from the norm into its own little eddy. Naomi Goodsir convinces me that niche in perfumery means the same thing that ‘young’ and ‘modern’ mean in fashion--code for the most recent iteration of an easily identified item.
from scent hurdle.com
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