Zadig & Voltaire
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Tonka bean arrives in full force, creamy and almost almond-like, its bitter-sweet facets immediately enveloped in frankincense smoke. The effect is surprisingly dense from the start, like walking into a room where something sweet has been burning for hours, leaving behind sticky resinous walls.
Vanilla thickens the composition considerably, melding with the frankincense to create an almost balsamic quality whilst patchouli begins to assert its earthy, slightly chocolatey presence. The spicy accord—warm, ambiguous, somewhere between pepper and cinnamon—weaves through the sweetness, preventing the scent from becoming entirely soporific.
What remains is a skin-close veil of sweetened patchouli and residual smoke, the vanilla and tonka having merged into an indistinct gourmand base that's more felt than explicitly smelled. The woodiness emerges finally, dry and slightly dusty, like sandalwood filtered through ash.
Just Rock! pour Lui is Nathalie Lorson's exploration of sweetness through smoke—a fragrance that inverts the typical masculine structure by placing tonka bean at the very top, creating an immediate, almost gourmand impact that's tempered by billowing frankincense. This isn't the polite, churchy incense of traditional masculines; it's resinous and dense, its smoke curling through vanilla like a leather jacket worn over bare skin. The composition reads as deliberately provocative, almost confrontational in its sweetness, yet the patchouli and spice accord provide a necessary tension that prevents it from collapsing into dessert.
What makes this compelling is how Lorson balances the inherent richness of tonka and vanilla—notes that could easily veer saccharine—with frankincense's austere, almost medicinal quality. The smoke doesn't cleanse the sweetness; it amplifies it, the way burning sugar creates caramel. There's a headshop quality here, an unapologetic embrace of the smoky-sweet aesthetic that defined a certain strain of 2010s masculines, but executed with more restraint than most.
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Yves Saint Laurent
3.9/5 (292)