Byredo
Byredo
255 votes
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The first quarter-hour is all serrated edges—black pepper and caraway create an almost medicinal spiciness that's cut through with juniper's piney bitterness. There's something deliberately confrontational about this opening, like biting into a peppercorn whilst drinking neat gin. The aromatic sharpness borders on nasal-clearing intensity before the frankincense begins its slow creep upward.
As the spices recede, the frankincense takes centre stage, but it's a smoky, leathery interpretation rather than purely devotional—imagine incense ash rubbed into supple hide. The hyacinth emerges as an unexpected counterpoint, its green-soap quality creating odd, beautiful dissonance against the darker elements. This middle phase is where Baudelaire reveals its literary pretensions: complex, layered, occasionally contradictory.
Hours later, you're left with a woody-earthy whisper dominated by papyrus and patchouli, the latter less head-shop and more forest floor after rain. Black amber provides a skin-close warmth with the faintest animalic pulse, whilst phantom traces of leather and incense linger in the weave of fabric. It's intimate now, no longer performing—just a haunting reminder of the drama that came before.
Byredo's Baudelaire doesn't ease you in—it grabs you by the lapels with a bristling collision of black pepper and caraway, that peculiar spice that sits somewhere between rye bread and medieval apothecary. The juniper berry adds a gin-soaked sharpness, cutting through with evergreen bitterness that feels more back-alley bar than manicured garden. This is poetry written in a haze of absinthe and leather-bound volumes left too close to the fire.
The genius lies in how that spiced aggression slowly yields to frankincense, which doesn't arrive as church incense but rather as something dirtier, more resinous, tangled up with a leather accord that smells of worn jackets rather than pristine saddles. The hyacinth—unexpected, almost jarring—weaves a green, slightly soapy floralcy through the smoke, preventing the composition from collapsing into pure darkness. It's this tension that makes Baudelaire compelling: the constant push-pull between the refined and the debauched.
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3.5/5 (327)