Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle
Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle
512 votes
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The pink pepper snaps against bitter orange peel with an almost astringent quality, bergamot providing only the briefest moment of roundness before the green vetiver surges forward. It's sharp, vegetal, reminiscent of split grass stems and crushed angelica root—there's nothing polite about this introduction.
The Haitian vetiver settles into its full, earthy complexity, revealing those characteristic cocoa-ish facets whilst maintaining an almost aggressive greenness. Cashmeran wraps around it with a musky, slightly metallic woodiness, whilst sandalwood and cedar create a dry, fibrous texture that emphasises rather than softens the central note's raw character.
Oakmoss asserts itself with beautiful, bitter tenacity, that classic chypre mossiness intertwining with musk to create something quietly dank and skin-close. The vetiver persists, less sharp now but still uncompromisingly earthy, like the smell of wool and wood smoke clinging to skin after hours outdoors.
Dominique Ropion's Vétiver Extraordinaire takes the classic gentlemen's note and strips away all the expected lavender-lemon propriety, delivering instead a bracingly green, almost aggressive interpretation that borders on the feral. The opening salvo of pink pepper and bitter orange zest cuts through bergamot's usual politeness, creating a spiced citrus accord that feels more like crushed stems than Sunday morning cologne. But it's the Haitian vetiver—gnarled, earthy, shot through with that variety's characteristic bitter-chocolate facets—that dominates proceedings, amplified by cashmeran's woody-musky heft rather than softened by it. The sandalwood and cedar here aren't creamy soloists; they're textural elements that emphasise the vetiver's fibrous, almost hemp-like quality. Oakmoss in the base adds that pre-reformulation chypre bitterness, a grey-green dankness that keeps proceedings firmly in the forest floor rather than the barbershop. This is vetiver for those who find traditional interpretations too groomed, too safe. It speaks to the wearer who appreciates that green doesn't mean fresh in the aquatic sense—it means chlorophyll, sap, the verdant smell of things still growing. Ropion has created something that feels equally at home on someone emerging from a contemporary art gallery opening or a autumn walk through damp woodland. It's confidently unsettling, the olfactory equivalent of a perfectly tailored jacket worn with muddy boots.
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