Chiseled Face
Chiseled Face
388 votes
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Bergamot and lemon pierce through immediately, their citric brightness accompanied by a green galbanum snap and the slightly tart blackcurrant note. Within moments, however, hyacinth and lavender emerge, already softening the fresh opening into something noticeably powdery and floral-leaning—the transition happens almost too quickly, as though the green top notes are merely window dressing for what's to come.
The full floral choir arrives in earnest: lily of the valley dominates with its sweet, slightly soapy character whilst tuberose adds creamy indolic depth and rose provides classical fullness. Orris root thickens everything into powder, aided by honeysuckle's honeyed sweetness and jasmine's warm florality. This is the fragrance's longest and most coherent phase, where the chypre skeleton of oakmoss and leather beneath prevents complete floral saturation.
By the fourth hour, the base emerges as the florals fade rapidly—sandalwood and cedar provide a woody dryness whilst amber and musk add skin-like warmth. Frankincense lingers as a slightly resinous, almost ecclesiastical note. Unfortunately, the overall projection has diminished to barely detectable levels, making this phase more academic than olfactory for anyone beyond arm's reach.
Guy Noir Chiseled Face is a densely populated floral that reads less like a modern fragrance and more like stepping into a powdery-skinned aristocrat's dressing room circa 1968. Pellégrino has constructed something deliberately opulent and suffocatingly feminine, despite the unisex classification—the concentration of lily, tuberose, and rose in the heart creates an almost claustrophobic wall of indolic florals that verges on soapy. The opening's galbanum and blackcurrant attempt to cut through with green, slightly tart freshness, but they're immediately subsumed beneath waves of lily of the valley and orris root, which combine into something powdery and faintly cosmetic—imagine the inside of a vintage compact mirror.
What makes this fragrance compelling rather than merely dated is the chypre framework supporting the floral excess. Oakmoss and leather in the base provide skeletal structure, preventing the composition from dissolving into pure floral mush, whilst frankincense adds an almost religious solemnity to what could otherwise be unbearably sweet. The tuberose particularly shines here, its creamy indolicity contrasting against dry vetiver and cedar.
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3.5/5 (115)