Claude Andre Hebert
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The first spray delivers a face-slap of hot spices and smoke—cinnamon and pepper wrestling with citrus whilst charcoal dust settles over everything like volcanic ash. Figolide's cucumber-fresh fig leaf tries valiantly to keep things airy, but the grapefruit's already surrendering to the encroaching darkness. It's sweaty, mineral, and strangely compelling, like standing too close to a tandoor oven in a fruit market.
Prune emerges in all its fermented, sticky glory, that particular sweetness of dried fruit left too long in brandy, whilst cardamom adds aromatic relief and nagarmotha contributes its signature earthy-medicinal bitterness. The carcass accord blooms here—animalic, slightly rank, unmistakably fleshy—tempered by thyme's camphoraceous brightness. It's simultaneously gourmand and deeply unsettling, like stumbling upon a medieval apothecary that doubles as a charcuterie.
The woods finally assert dominance: creamy Australian sandalwood and gaiac's smoky weight merge with cedar and cashmere woods into a burnished, honeyed embrace. Patchouli absolute and labdanum add dark chocolate-resinous depth whilst Orcanox/Lorenox lend that peculiar glowing quality, like amber lit from within. The vanilla here isn't sweet—it's woody-phenolic, smoky, nearly burnt, still haunted by those charcoal embers from hours ago.
Eaux Trouble$ de Zïlon reads like a deliberate provocation—a fragrance that positions dried prune against charcoal smoke and carcass-like animalic facets, daring you to find beauty in the uncomfortable. Galardi orchestrates this tension brilliantly: the opening deploys figolide's fresh-fig greenness and a bracing grapefruit-bergamot citrus blast, only to immediately smother them under a thick duvet of cinnamon and black pepper heat. That charcoal accord isn't metaphorical; it genuinely smells like extinguished embers, ashy and mineral, creating an unsettling backdrop for what follows. The prune heart is where things turn genuinely strange—this isn't polite dried fruit, but something sticky, fermented, almost Port wine-soaked, amplified by nagarmotha's earthy, woody-bitter cypiol character. The carcass note (likely a cuir compound or costus-adjacent material) adds a feral, slightly putrid leather quality that shouldn't work but absolutely does, grounded by medicinal thyme that keeps everything from toppling into pure decay. By the base, you're enveloped in a magnificent woody symphony: Australian sandalwood's creamy richness, gaiac's smoky rose-wood facets, and Haitian vetiver's rooty darkness all reinforced by Orcanox and Lorenox—those IFF woody-amber molecules that add honeyed, almost glowing warmth. This is for the perfume obsessive who's bored of safe woody spices, who wants their vanilla tinged with ash and their sweetness complicated by rot. Utterly compelling, occasionally revolting, never boring.
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3.8/5 (441)