Etnia
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Red apple's wet sweetness detonates alongside a triple threat of peppers and pimento, the fruit's innocent juiciness immediately complicated by saffron's metallic tang and grapefruit's astringent bitterness. Within minutes, the heat builds—not gradually but insistently—as if someone's turned up a dial, transforming that initial freshness into something feverish and deliberately unsettling.
Lavender emerges not as soother but as instigator, its aromatic camphor amplified by habanero chilli's capsaicin burn and cinnamon leaf's spiky, almost clove-like intensity. The accord becomes genuinely peculiar here—simultaneously herbal, incendiary, and oddly floral, with benzoin's vanilla beginning to weep through the cracks, sweetening but never quite taming the relentless spice assault.
The "spoiled spice" accord reveals itself fully now, a dusty, slightly funky earthiness that sits beneath tobacco's honeyed leather and cedarwood's pencil-shaving dryness. Amberwood and benzoin create a golden, resinous glow that's undeniably sweet yet edged with something feral, like discovering crystallised honey in a forgotten wooden box filled with oxidised cinnamon sticks and sun-baked resins.
Etnia opens with a brilliant provocation: the juice-dripping sweetness of red apple sliced through with the electric tingle of red pepper and pimento, creating that peculiar hot-cold sensation of biting into something both crisp and dangerously spiced. Carlos Benaïm has orchestrated a fragrance that refuses to choose between gourmand indulgence and aromatic intensity, instead letting them collide with the metallic floral sharpness of saffron threading through grapefruit's bitter pith. This is lavender utterly transformed—not the genteel aromatic of classic fougères but Provençal lavender set alight with habanero chilli and cinnamon leaf, creating an almost medicinal fieriness that prickles and glows simultaneously.
What makes Etnia genuinely arresting is how those "spoiled spices" in the base—oxidised, slightly off, earthily fermented—mingle with benzoin's vanilla warmth and tobacco's leathery sweetness. The effect is less polished perfumery and more the intoxicating fug of a spice merchant's storeroom, where opened sacks of cinnamon bark sit alongside aged wood and resinous amber. The cedar and amberwood provide just enough structure to prevent complete chaos, but this fragrance revels in its controlled disorder.
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3.9/5 (1.2k)