Issey Miyake
Issey Miyake
124 votes
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Cistus and labdanum cascade across your skin in warm, honeyed waves, immediately supported by a dusty rose that refuses sentimentality. The opening bristles with incense-like resinosity, almost medicinal, like stepping into a fragrant room that's been sealed for days.
Pink pepper crackles through the composition, its brightness contrasting deliciously with deepening cumin smoke—suddenly this becomes a genuinely spiced fragrance, warm and lived-in rather than cosmetic. Leather begins to surface beneath, adding a subtle animalic depth that grounds the sweetness of the resins above.
The fragrance retreats into its woody skeleton. Vetiver becomes increasingly prominent, slightly bitter and green-tinged, whilst sandalwood adds a powdery, almost creamy softness to the frame. Dark woods and leather linger in a haze of subtle smoke, creating a skin scent that's more sensed than smelled—intimate, haunting, unchanging.
L'Eau d'Issey pour Homme Or Encens inhabits a peculiar liminal space—caught between the austere minimalism of Japanese aesthetics and something far more sensual and brooding. Christophe Raynaud has crafted a fragrance that opens with the resinous embrace of cistus and labdanum, those honeyed, almost medicinal gum notes that immediately conjure temple incense and aged amber. The rose here isn't decorative; it arrives as a dusty, slightly parched element, more archaeological than romantic, as if it's been pressed between old parchment.
What makes this scent genuinely compelling is the olfactory sleight of hand in the heart. Pink pepper ignites first, a bright, almost peppery jab that seems to clash with the woody sweetness beneath, but cumin enters like smoke—earthy, almost fermented—and suddenly the spice accord transforms into something genuinely warm rather than merely sharp. This is where the fragrance reveals its true nature: a study in controlled heat, the aromatic equivalent of watching embers glow rather than flames consume.
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4.0/5 (161)