I'm pretty fed up with winter. I'm over heavy coats, boots, layers of cashmere, freezing eyeballs and the disgusting slush banks. Winter smells quite good, though, with wafts from wood stoves, evergreens, roasted chestnuts from street vendors in the city and mandarin oranges from Florida and Spain. but just like everything else, winter smells and looks better in Siena.
Sienne l'Hiver (Siena in Winter), a Bertrand Duchaufour creation for Eau d'Italie, intends to evokes the atmosphere of the old Tuscan city during this season. This is not the first time Duchaufour composes the scent of chilly stones- I feel the same thing in his Dzonkha (L'Artisan).
Sienne l'Hiver opens up earthy and rooty. You can almost touch the dampness of the Tuscan landscape. It's very much an iris scent up until the briny drydown. At times I think of it as the love child of Dzonkha and Maître Parfumeur et Gantier's Iris Bleu Gris. It retains the cool sensation and crispness thanks to the violet leaf note and just a hint of something smoky stirs the air- someone opened the door in the early morning, letting the smells from a kitchen with a wood burning stove mix with the chill.
That's usually the part where I ask myself why i don't yet own a full bottle of this Eau d'Italie perfume. The answer comes to me about an hour later, when olive oil and brine make themselves known. I like it a lot and find the concept both pleasing and intriguing, but does it work as a personal scent? I love the smell of our local Italian deli (Cosmo makes the best fresh Mozzarella in New Jersey), but is it perfume? So I go through another sample, still undecided.
Sienne l´Hiver ($120, 100 ml) and the rest of the Eau d'Italie line can be found at Luckyscent (Scent Bar) in Los Angeles as well as from Aedes and Lafco in NYC. The latter is very generous with samples, which is what allowed me to give the scent a thorough testing.
Photos of Siena in the snow (and my personal favorite, Fonte Gaia in Piazza del Campo) by Virri on Flickr.
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