Habana Cocoa Duftkumpels

I've had my reservations when it comes to cocoa perfumes. In the niche realm, they're usually too powdery and sweet, while artisanal compositions often use cocoa as a barely perceptible undertone, smoothing out more powerful notes, such as oud. What made me fall in love with Habana is an authentic gourmand experience, with bittersweet cocoa at the forefront.

The mixture of cocoa absolutes is mouthwatering. It's fatty and slightly milky, but not lactonic. As such, it doesn't smell dry like a cocoa powder, but it's more in the realm of dark chocolate. This aspect is underlined by virginia tobacco, adding hay-like and fruity facets to the opening. Somehow, a conjointure of aromatics and fattiness brings enough of a lift. While remarkably dense, I can't say that Habana is at any point a cloying fragrance.

Looking at the humble note pyramid, one would be absolutely correct in assuming that there aren't many twists and turns. However, allowing the raw materials to do most of the work can be a good thing. The quality is incredible, so while the wearing experience is one-dimensional, it's never tiresome. To me, it feels like a luxurious, albeit a bit predictable companion.

It takes about 20 minutes for tobacco and cocoa to merge with castoreum. Think of it as a less potent Assam oud. It provides leathery and smoky nuances, but without dominant woodiness. This allows the blend to breathe and remain positively chocolaty. An overdose of siam benzoin offers a spicy, almost boozy vanilla and significantly boosts the performance. A few sprays will last you a whole day on skin (and of course a whole winter on clothes).

Availability is the main issue. Since it's currently sold out, you've got two options. You can either opt for Habana Cocoa Essenca which is an even denser version (45% oil) or keep an eye out and wait for a bottle to pop up at some auction. I believe that Duftkumpels will concoct another batch eventually - it's their most popular product after all.

Habana cacao is just a crazy masterpiece that i absolutely adore. It smells like a pure cacao bomb but its not overly sweet so its absolutely stunning. You can really feel the depth of the perfume because the perfumer has just real high quality vintage materials and it is blended to perfection. Super strong perfume so i cant really wear it all the time but when i do find a opportunity to use it its a 10/10 for sure!

After trying quite a few cacao/ chocolate fragrances such as RO2 from ALD, Ambergris cacao from Elkhaldi and Siberian oudh from Barzakh, I think Habana cocoa remains my favourite. This composition relies mainly on tobacco, castoreum and cocoa. The tobacco is dry, the castoreum is animalic, smoky and slightly leathery, and the cocoa is rather gourmand. The siam benzoin sweetens the whole scent and gives it a vanillic touch. I would classify this as a slightly gourmand gentleman scent

Winter dreams its own episodes. It leaves deep traces of wild suede paws in dark bittersweet chocolates, the spicy bitter ones that flood your thoughts in warm waves. Obscure glimmers of dried plums, the last purple lanterns on cocoa-black paths. You follow the familiar pheromones, the trail of animal-hide tracks, the trace of bitter myrrh stones in misty tobacco barns. There are benzoin light beams falling on hay bales, angel hair webs on Havana straw threads beneath bright Virginia pipe fruit leaves in distant Caribbean summers.
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"Habana Cocoa" thrives on a fruity pipe tobacco accord combined with various dark cocoa varieties and animal-leathery castoreum.
The fragrance opens with the spicy-bitter chocolate notes of Indian cocoa absolute as well as the dry plum-fruity aromas of pipe tobacco. Soon, wild leathery-animalic notes emerge, blending with the rich, slightly leathery Madagascan cocoa notes. Bitter resinous myrrh and black-vanilla-like benzoin expand the bitter-sweet overall picture with the darkest amber facets. Even the Spanish labdanum appears more dry-woody-leathery than honey-like. The base is then characterized by bright Virginia aromas, sweet-mild yet spicy hay and straw notes, in which resins and leather still subtly linger.
As projection and longevity are already significantly above average, I find the fragrance particularly pleasant and especially multifaceted when applied sparingly. For me, a winter gourmand dream, not least due to the necessary tobacco-leather edge.

Do you remember the golden glow of my eyes?
The never-ending question about the worlds behind our temples?
And did you notice the dragon scales on my hand? Long before I surrendered to the lava flow of dark chocolate, when the inside became too big for the outside. At first, you thought you could hear the gentle purring of a cat, but as the warmth of melting resins poured bittersweet over my skin, it left nothing but a shimmering fuzz of wild leather, as if my armor of iridescent myrrh was melting like my benzoin heart.
Do you remember the echo of those distant words, echoing softly in the room, or how the purring swelled into a throaty rumble?
Then I felt how the dreamed breath clouds wrapped ever warmer around my neck and the soft ground of wrinkled tobacco leaves trembled beneath my leathery soles. In the rhythm of my wingbeats.

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Gourmand fragrances are a tricky subject for me. Theoretically, I like the idea of smelling like chocolate, roasted almonds, coffee eclair, or crème brûlée with a crunchy caramel crust, especially in winter, but usually the dream ends after a short half hour to an hour with a queasy stomach and a long walk in the fresh air. Such scents are often just too sweet for me or too monotonous, and although I had actually put aside the desire for a decadent, delicious comfort scent a while ago, I was unexpectedly found by one such fragrance with Habana Cocoa.
The scent immediately sweeps me away at the beginning with a wave of bittersweet melted chocolate of the darkest kind, guided by castoreum into gently purring paths. After one or two hours, a dry, almost hay-like tobacco note, myrrh, and benzoin provide a pleasant change without significantly altering the character of the fragrance.
With benzoin and me, it’s a bit of a thing: sometimes this resin develops an unpleasant vanilla pudding sweetness, and sometimes it turns into the scent of sun-warmed skin - here, the benzoin unfolds together with the chocolate and the underlying castoreum a golden glowing, heart-melting quality that has sweetened many a cold, dark winter evening for me. But the best truly comes at the end, when the castoreum steps more prominently into the foreground, merging with unsweetened, also leathery labdanum (as I know it finely woven into the base of vintage chypre fragrances) and fading out with cocoa-dusted tobacco notes.
Sprayed, this extraordinary and contrasting gourmand magic would probably be too much of a good thing for me, but dabbed sparingly, Habana Cocoa wraps me around its finger anew with each wear.

Thank you for this unexpectedly successful metamorphosis into a chocolate gourmand friend, dear Floyd.