Also known as ‘Tobacco Toscano’ (that’s how it’s listed for sale on the Aedes website), Santa Maria Novella Toscano is named after the Toscano cigar that was first produced in Tuscany in 1818, so Tobacco is a prominent part of the scent mix, yet lightly sweetened with a vanilla and amber blend to woo female consumers as well as men.
Toscano introduces itself with a fresh bergamot-laced burst, then settles into a smooth jasmine-laced blonde leather and mild tobacco leaf routine that’s ever so gradually overtaken by an exceptionally warm and attractive sweetness that nearly drips like honey off the skin. Louise stopped by earlier in the day to drop off some packages and said, “Wow, you smell really good!” after I opened the door to let her in, which took me completely by surprise as the phase changes were so subtle that I hadn’t even noticed how the Toscano had progressed on my skin from bright, citrusy floral to warm, leafy amber.
It’s now about eight hours after a rather more generous than usual application and Toscano is subtly sweet and totally laid back, with a boozy, smoky tone that plays like a favorite pop song rolling out the windows of a car idling at a distant stoplight — and because it sits so lightly on the skin, it easily works in hot summer weather (just in case the idea of a malted tobacco amber makes you think only of Fall/Winter).
Other opinions:
Glam Man Grooming: “Santa Maria Novella … strikes a very contemporary chord with scents that are uniquely clean and warm and very different from many of today’s mass marketed fragrances . . . I was drawn to one of their newer fragrances called Toscano which contains notes of bergamot, tobacco, vanilla, birch leaf and burnt malt. I’m not generally a fan of “tabacco” scents but this one is well rounded and comes across as more of a balance between all of the fragrance notes.”
Joe Frances at Basenotes: “A fairly light tobacco fragrance, with a honey or amber element that I think is the source of its sweetness, and makes it unisex. I was looking for a pipe tobacco note, but that’s not what we get here . . . I think that, while Toscano might be just a bit too sweet and a bit too light for me, I imagine that there are a lot of BNs (Basenote Members) out there who would really go for this.”
Now Smell This: “The first two times I wore Toscano, I thought it was boring and was upset to smell a similarity between it and recent (bland) vanilla fragrances, but when I sprayed on a generous amount of Toscano, I liked it more and the tobacco note (which I enjoy) was amplified.”
Video clip below of a woman making the famous Toscano cigars:
