Giorgio Armani
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The first spray delivers a bracing slap of green cardamom and the slightly astringent, hay-like quality of maté tea, cutting through the air like a cold blade. Bergamot adds citric brightness but never dominates, instead creating negative space around that spiced tea accord, whilst something honeyed lurks just beneath, promising sweetness without yet delivering it.
Osmanthus unfurls with its characteristic apricot-leather duality, simultaneously fruity and animalic, whilst plum adds a purple-dark juiciness that never tips into cloying. The jasmine floats atop this stone-fruit richness like steam, indolic enough to add body but refined, working in concert with the tobacco to create a hazy, golden warmth that envelops without suffocating.
What remains is essentially a skin scent of sandalwood and vanilla rendered sophisticated by lingering traces of tobacco and cardamom's ghost. The sweetness has settled into something resinous and slightly powdery, less perfume than aura—warm, woody, with just enough spice memory to prevent it from becoming generic woody-amber territory.
Bleu Lazuli reads like a love letter to the golden hour in a Persian garden, where sweetness becomes architecture rather than decoration. Pascal Gaurin has orchestrated something quietly subversive here: what could have been another syrupy oriental instead wields its richness with restraint, the cardamom and maté tea opening providing an almost medicinal sharpness that keeps the plum and osmanthus from collapsing into jammy indulgence. This is osmanthus as it should be—leathery apricot skin rather than fruit cocktail—its natural suede-like quality amplified by sandalwood that actually smells of wood, not the synthetic creaminess that plagues modern releases.
The jasmine weaves through like expensive incense smoke, never screeching, whilst the honeyed tobacco in the base brings a burnished, resinous warmth that recalls amber without relying on the usual suspects. There's an old-school Guerlainade quality to the vanilla here; it reads as benzoin and vanillin rather than cupcake frosting, earthed by those woody and spicy accords that prevent any descent into gourmand territory. This is for the wearer who finds most modern orientals either too loud or too sweet, who wants opulence that whispers rather than shouts. Think dimly lit libraries with leather-bound books, cashmere against skin, the weight of good jewellery. It's unisex in the truest sense—neither masculine nor feminine, simply elegant and rather knowing.
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3.9/5 (223)