Monday, October 26, 2009

SOTD: L'Artisan Parfumeur Navegar


Navegar always smells to me like cedar. Period. So this time I wanted to keep a nose on it and try to catch those other notes that other people always seem to smell.

I sniffed industriously from the moment I sprayed and there were brief ghostly hints of other things. (Is that the cucumber they're talking about? Is that the black pepper? They're talking aquatic, I'm not getting the aquatic, unless it's the cucumber? Wait, he says he's getting _lime_?) Very brief. I'm ten minutes in, and it's cedar. Just cedar.

That's not to say that cedar is insufficient. I love cedar. Cedar is why I wear Navegar. But few people like... OK, what do you call a soliflore if it's not about a flower, but about wood? Solibois?

Anyway, as I was saying, few people like single-note perfumes. And in fact, Luckyscent declares that this perfume contains "red pepper, ginger, lime, absolute rum, black pepper, incense, star anise, juniper, cedar wood, guaiac wood". I get, again, cedar. So there's got to be more in here, but perhaps I just can't smell it.

"Can't smell it" is a problem that I and apparently many people have with some L'Artisan perfumes. And it doesn't seem to be the same perfumes for everyone - for example, scanning the Review Roundup, I see one reviewer who can only briefly smell L'Artisan Dzing! and dislikes Piment Brulant (which suggests that he can smell it), while I have no difficulty smelling Dzing!, and can't smell Piment Brulant for more than a second or two.

So: Cedar. A lovely light cedar, not too aggressive or resinous. There might be the faintest possible floral note, because it sometimes smells the way I'd imagine a cedar flower to smell, if cedar produced sheaves of little white flowers. Except floral notes are the one thing that _isn't_ listed in that notes list.

Navegar is lovely, to my nose. If you have my nose, I recommend it. But it would probably be safest to smell it first, to make sure that you can, well, smell it.

Review Roundup: Bois de Jasmin and Fragrantica and Basenotes.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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