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08/28/2015
ColinM
516 Reviews
ColinM
5
Contemporary incense & cardamom
Given the name and the slightly outdated packaging echoing (probably unvoluntarily) Haschisch Men by Veejaga, I was expecting some mild and uninteresting sort of herbal/pine fresh fougère. Well, Villa Ocre is a whole another story on the contrary. It opens as a surprisingly pleasant kind of carbon-copy of many “cold”, sharp incense-cedar fragrances like Comme des Garçons Kyoto, or Christian Lacroix Tumulte – and like for the Lacroix, the packaging has quite nothing to do with the fragrance. Albeit a bit derivative, Villa Ocre is quite much enjoyable; slightly warmer than the two (and similar) abovementioned fragrances, extremely smooth and nice to smell on yourself, unobtrusively simple and refined in its crisp incense-wood structure. But there’s something more going on, which makes it slightly more peculiar than it seems at first – it’s not just about a couple of smooth woody aromachemicals. There is a warm, spicy, mildly sweet vibe coming from an orange-infused accord of cardamom and I think some mild resins too, which as the evolution progresses, takes a bit more prominence slowly turning Villa Ocre into a mellow, and quite interesting blend of a Kyoto-style “contemporary” balsamic incense with something spicier and warmer like Cartier’s Declaration - finally to the point it ends on a drydown which is basically a more transparent, balsamic and incense-y version of Declaration tinted with orange and cheap vetiver. Nothing groundbreaking, but informally elegant and pleasantly compelling to say the least.
7/10
7/10
