Candles marketed to men usually smell of musk (“the animal in you”), wood (the untamed wilderness), musky-woods (hunting deer in the untamed wilderness), leather (baseball mitt!), vetiver (cut grass), even hamburgers (White Castle), but all those supposedly manly candle aromas smell like so many roses and chocolate-covered marshmallows compared to perfumer Olivia Giacobetti’s Dans l’Atelier de Cézanne candle; it’s the most “masculine,” austere-severe candle scent I’ve ever smelled. Dans l’Atelier de Cézanne is downright UNcomfortable; as I sniff it, I feel an ancient bottle of flammable fluid in a rusty tin bottle is on the verge of igniting, a storm of dust bunnies might suffocate me, or dry-rot could cause the floor under my feet to collapse.

Need I say…I love it?

The Dans l’Atelier de Cézanne aroma was created for the artist Vincent Beaurin and his Le Spectre installation at Paul Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence last July and August. The PR materials say it all:

Nothing has changed in this ancient studio since Paul Cézanne passed away and his paintings were removed. Time has laid a veil of fine dust over it, as the Provençal heat has almost mineralized the wood of the furniture, of his easel and of the floorboards, long stained with colours, oil paints and turpentine.

Giacobetti has worked with Beaurin twice before* and was asked, this time, to concoct a perfume that captured the “essence” of Cézanne‘s workspace…

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