Carner
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The davana announces itself with that distinctive boozy-apricot character, immediately complicated by the rum's molasses-dark sweetness. It's heady and disorienting in the best way, like walking into a room where something both medicinal and indulgent has just occurred.
The milk accord emerges as an almost savoury presence, its lactonic creaminess colliding with the gaiac's camphoraceous bite and tonka's hay-dried warmth. This is where the fragrance finds its peculiar balance—sweet but not sugary, woody but not austere, with the woods beginning to assert their pencil-shaving dryness against that persistent boozy sweetness.
The cedar and amyris dominate, creating a balsamic, slightly waxy skin scent that's been softened by lingering tonka. The vetiver adds just enough earth and grey-green grassiness to keep things grounded, whilst phantom traces of that opening sweetness occasionally resurface, like incense smoke caught in wooden beams.
Carner's Palo Santo is a study in contradictions—a gourmand that never feels edible, a woody fragrance that whispers rather than shouts. Shyamala Maisondieu has crafted something genuinely unusual here: the davana's jammy, apricot-tinged liquor quality collides with rum to create an opening that suggests fermented fruit rather than cocktail hour, whilst the milk accord in the heart acts as a strange, lactonic buffer between sweet and sacred. This isn't the resinous church incense you might expect from the name; instead, the Paraguayan gaiac wood lends a medicinal, almost mentholated quality that cuts through the sweetness like a scalpel. The tonka bean doesn't simply add vanilla—it deepens the entire composition with a hay-like, coumarin richness that makes the whole affair feel like smelling the air inside a wooden chapel where someone's spilt honeyed rum across ancient pews. The base woods—Atlas cedar, Dominican amyris, Haitian vetiver—create a trinity of pencil shavings, balsamic warmth, and earthy rootedness. This is for those who want their woody fragrances to feel inhabited rather than austere, who appreciate when something gourmand refuses to play by dessert-counter rules. It suits late autumn evenings and anyone who's ever found solace in the smell of old libraries, antique shops, and rituals half-remembered. There's an ecclesiastical quality here that never becomes sanctimonious, a sweetness that never cloys.
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3.8/5 (108)