When he reviewed Coeur de Vétiver Sacré last week, Kevin said that L’Artisan Parfumeur (along with Diptyque and Comme des Garçons) no longer had “the heart for off-center or ‘risky’ perfumes”. I’ll have to regretfully agree about Diptyque, and I haven’t thrown in the towel yet but admittedly Comme des Garçons’ output has seemed a wee bit repetitive lately. On the subject of L’Artisan though, I’ll have to respectfully disagree. I did not love Coeur de Vétiver Sacré, and I didn’t love the two before that — Al Oudh and Nuit de Tubéreuse — either, still, loving a perfume is not the same as respecting it. None of them were dumbed down or boring, and Coeur de Vétiver Sacré and Nuit de Tubéreuse in particular struck me as interesting attempts to do something new with raw materials that can easily descend into cliché.

If anything, I think L’Artisan is looking better than ever since they took on perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour as the not-really-exactly-the-house-nose. I adored Havana Vanille (and in today’s rapid launch environment, it’s hard to remember that Havana Vanille is barely a year old). I adore Traversée du Bosphore even more…

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