Matiere Premiere, Gallivant Naples and Guerlain Habit Rouge Dress Code – Skin Time November 2021

Matiere Premiere

A good deal of excitement appears to have been generated by Matiere Premiere*, but I must confess I don’t entirely share it. There’s no doubt a few scents from the range are worth your attention. But as a whole, the brand – all of whose wares have been composed by Aurelien Guichard – feels as though it has been put together in order to tick very specific commercial boxes, rather than develop the field of scent creation. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. But it does mean that the company’s target audience is perhaps not the sort of person reading these words right now.

The greatest praise is being heaped on Bois D’Ebene, which is perhaps another reason I find myself unable to experience the same level of excitement about this house that many others have enjoyed. It is, to my nose, yet another example of the rather tired overdose of synthetic sandalwoods that blights too large a number of modern releases (see Penhaligon’s Halfeti for an especially crass case of this sort of thing). I concede that many seem to delight in the aggressive sillage of these beasts, but I find them boorish and off-putting. Each to their own.

Radical Rose doesn’t live up to its name. It’s certainly convincing as a rose – and it’s never unpleasant – but far from being radical, it comes across as rather trite and predictable. Beware the hipster who keeps reminding you they’re a hipster. Santal Austral is a smooth-enough take on sandalwood, although it fails to display any especially remarkable features. And Falcon Leather is a been-here-before take on the likes of Tuscan Leather, albeit a very well-made one, with a suggestion of petroleum notes to suggest some Middle Eastern inspiration. 

I was far more impressed than I expected to be with Oud Seven. Given the somewhat pedestrian nature of much of this brand’s output, I thought the oud would offer nothing beyond rose-saffron-leather cliches. But its animalic side displays greater potency than I’d anticipated, and the pepper note at the top possesses an attractive, no-holds-barred balsiness. Wear it, and you can just about detect a desert mirage hover into view. 

The best of the bunch – again, somewhat surprisingly – is Neroli Oranger. An unpretentious cologne – almost glowing with a gentle, spring-morning luminosity – it mixes herbal inflections with white floral notes and paints a sigh-inducing picture of crisp, white sheets against pristine skies. Easy, unforced charm. 

Gallivant Naples

Charm of a cooler sort is in evidence in Gallivant Naples*, composed by Luca Maffei. In his tenth scent, brand founder Nick Steward wanted to convey an air of sprezzatura-esque, Mediterranean insouciance. And he’s undoubtedly achieved that with the lovely, gently marine-like, citrusy-incense accord at the heart of this scent. If there are any Neapolitan mafia dons here, they’re safely tucked away having a siesta. But is the whole thing just too relaxed and unassuming to be memorable? I’ll leave that to you.

Guerlain Habit Rouge Dress Code

Guerlain Habit Rouge is in no danger of being forgotten by anybody any time soon, but one flanker that has been relegated to the great big Discontinued vat in the sky is the Dress Code** version composed by Thierry Wasser in 2015 to mark the original’s 50th anniversary. I had cause to revisit it in recent weeks, and I’m pleased to report that I’m glad I’ve hung on to my bottle. Like a sort of broader re-interpretation of Jean-Paul Guerlain’s 1965 masterpiece, it stretches all the disparate elements – the citrus, the leather, the vanilla – across a larger canvas and pins them further apart from each other. The result is both comforting and defamiliarising, forcing you to re-appraise the structure in a new light. If you never got a chance to try it when it was on general release, you may well want to seek out a few drops online.

Persolaise

* sample provided by the brand
** sample obtained by me

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