Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle
Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle
205 votes
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Geranium slaps you awake with its minty-green sharpness, immediately joined by the tingling, almost electric buzz of Sichuan pepper and a squeeze of tart blackcurrant that's more stem than berry. There's a fleeting impression of rose, but it's filtered through frosted glass—you sense its shape rather than smell it directly.
The isobutyl quinoline emerges with its strange, almost pharmaceutical leather effect, like the inside of a vintage camera case or the peculiar smell of new trainers meeting vetiver's earthy-grey coolness. The geranium persists, now less aggressive, settling into a skin-like floralcy that reads as abstract rather than botanical.
What remains is a pale green-grey shadow: vetiver and cedarwood providing a woody whisper, that synthetic leather accord hanging on like the memory of a smell rather than the thing itself. It's close to the skin now, austere and surprisingly tender in its minimalism.
Jean-Claude Ellena's Rose & Cuir is a masterclass in restraint, where the rose never actually appears—only its ghost, conjured through bourbon geranium's rosy-minty exhale and the sharp, verdant snap of Nepalese Sichuan pepper. This is leather imagined through the lens of a modernist, built not on heavy animalics but on isobutyl quinoline's peculiar, almost medicinal sharpness that reads as both austere and oddly comforting. The geranium dominates with its green, slightly metallic character, while blackcurrant adds a tart, cat-piss edge that keeps everything from becoming too pretty. Vetiver and cedarwood provide a whisper of earthiness, but they're supporting players in what is essentially a study of greenness meeting the idea of leather rather than its reality. The composition feels deliberately transparent, almost skeletal—Ellena strips away everything superfluous until you're left with the scent equivalent of a line drawing. This is for the person who finds most rose fragrances cloying and most leather scents bombastic, someone who appreciates intellectual rigour over sensory indulgence. It wears like a crisp linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, appropriate for the office but with enough of an edge to suggest you've got somewhere more interesting to be afterwards. In the Frédéric Malle lineup, it's the quiet one at the back of the room, not shouting for attention but repaying close study with its angular, uncompromising beauty.
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3.7/5 (92)