Acqua di Parma
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Star anise detonates with its liquorice-sharp intensity, immediately tempered by elemi's peppery-citrus resin and orange that's more pith than juice. The effect is bracing, astringent even, like crushing fennel seeds between your fingers whilst walking through an Italian herb garden at dawn.
Lavender and clary sage form the aromatic spine here, the former surprisingly dry and herbaceous rather than soapy, whilst petitgrain contributes its characteristic bitter-green snap. The cypress begins its ascent—dusty, silvered, faintly camphoraceous—reading less as decoration than as the landscape itself made tangible.
The coniferous trio of cypress, pine needle, and balsam fir settles into a soft, resinous whisper that clings close to skin. What remains is genuinely woody rather than synthetic, slightly powdery from the sage's residue, like sun-warmed bark and dried needles underfoot in a coastal pine forest.
Bertrand Duchaufour's Cipresso di Toscana reads like a Mediterranean hillside rendered in startling clarity—all silvered green needles and herb-strewn paths beneath cloudless skies. The opening marriage of star anise and elemi creates an unexpectedly resinous brightness, almost medicinal in its crystalline intensity, whilst blood orange lends just enough sweetness to prevent the composition from turning austere. This is freshness conceived not as aquatic banality but as proper aromatic precision: lavender from Provence meeting petitgrain's bitter leaf snap, clary sage adding its musky-herbal rasp to proceedings. The cypress itself—Duchaufour's clear protagonist—arrives not as generic "woody" abstraction but as the genuine article: dry, faintly camphoraceous, with that characteristic dusty-green quality that Mediterranean cypress trees possess in August heat. Pine needle and balsam fir extend this coniferous meditation into something genuinely forestral, yet the whole affair remains remarkably lifted, never succumbing to the heavy, sweetened woodiness that plagued so many late-90s releases. This is a fragrance for those who find traditional colognes insipid and conventional masculines overwrought—worn by architects visiting Tuscan renovation projects, by women who've no patience for department store florals, by anyone who prefers their scent wardrobe to smell of actual plants rather than the perfumer's fantasy of them. Best in warmth, when its herbal clarity reads as refreshment rather than chill.
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3.7/5 (151)