Serge Lutens Un Bois Sepia and Sinfonia di Note Saveur D’Artichaut

UN BOIS SEPIA: Begins with a cubist-like expression of candied citrus rinds, all angles and planes, made more so by that familiar sinus-clearing element I get at the opening of most every Lutens I’ve sprayed on my skin.

With Un Bois Sepia, the culprit at the root of this sharpened intro is an exceptionally dry cypress wood, an ingredient I’m usually disinclined to gush over, yet while cypress isn’t my favorite scent note to find featured in a fragrance (CdG Monocle Hinoki, anyone?), Un Bois Sepia distinguishes itself with a kinder, gentler version — a cypress that cues the horns for the fanfare entrance, then wisely dials it back for the duration of its visit.

In other words, it knows the difference between its outdoor voice and its indoor voice.

A commenter on Base Notes states that “I consider Un Bois Sepia to be dried red fruits in a wooden dish”, and this is a fair enough summation of how Un Bois Sepia presents itself after the cypress dials back, with the concentrated sugar of dried fruits wrapped in a deep patchouli bow.

I’ve read some commentary discussing how Un Bois Sepia is overly sugary and sweet, but I didn’t find this to be true; in fact, my experience was that the candied citrus sheds the spotlight about two hours in and the fragrance was pretty much a glowing wood/patchouli scent for the rest of its duration, softened with a slathering of incense notes.

If you’re a fan of Andy Tauer’s L’Air du Desert Marocain, then you’ll likely find the drydown phase of Un Bois Sepia appealing, as well. While L’Air du Desert Marocain is a dry, raw cedar fragrance, the layers of sugar and incense in Un Bois Sepia add a not unwelcome coat of polish to the olfactory furniture.

SAVEUR D’ARTICHAUT: Saveur D’Artichaut bills itself as an artichoke fragrance, yet it rides out of the bottle on a plume of citrus notes that are even sweeter and stronger than the intro to Un Bois Sepia. Citrus and cedar? Okay, I can see a certain logic to it, but citrus and artichoke? I feel like I’m being played.

Like Un Bois Sepia, Saveur D’Artichaut takes a few hours to shake off the more heady aspects to its bergamot nemesis, but once it does, it’s an attractively salty, herbacious scent, leaning toward the vegetal side of life without totally falling overboard into the wide celery sea (and yes, there’s a faint aqueous tint around the edges — I have no idea where it comes from or why it’s there).

A vaguely floral sweetness creeps into view and becomes more and more persistent as the fragrance hits the drydown phase, which is a little disconcerting — first the citrus opening, now the lightly sweetened homestretch. It seems that the pleasantly salty and warm scent of the artichoke plant at the heart of the perfume is transformed into a riff on the lighter aroma of the artichoke blossom.

Pity. I would have liked a lot more of the former, as this left turn into blossom land only manages to turn what seemed like an unusual concept into yet another vegetal floral perfume, and it’s not as if we aren’t already up to our hip-boots in all that.

So unless you’re the owner of a perfume collection with an aching, artichoke-blossom shaped hole at the center of it, the mishmash that’s Saveur D’Artichaut is at times creative and interesting, but it doesn’t stand out enough from the pack of niche scents to warrant more than cursory attention.

UPDATE:

After posting this entry, I decided to do an experiment — I suited up and went to go work out without having first scrubbed off the two fragrances I was testing. I’ve found that the heat of exercise jumpstarts a fragrance, even if it’s the next morning and it was the fragrance I’d applied yesterday.

Sure enough, halfway through my routine, Un Bois Sepia was all revved up and glowing on my skin, full of woodsy patchouli, while Saveur D’Artichaut intensified into an unpleasantly dank and brackish scent; whatever that aqueous note is that Sinfonia added to it — it’s a real deal killer for me.

***Review revised: 11/22/08