Cinq Mondes is, strictly speaking, not a perfume house so much as a spa line, and their first fragrance, Eau Egyptienne, was a lovely but rather ethereal hair and body mist by the talented perfumer Olivia Giacobetti (you can read a review at Bois de Jasmin). Their latest effort, Pluie d’Arômes, is a collection of five aromatherapy scents (three by Giacobetti, two by Jean-Pierre Bethouart) inspired by exotic locations. I’ve complained elsewhere about the avalanche of multi-scent niche launches over the past couple years, but I liked this set surprisingly well (I’d wear any of them quite happily) and it seems to hang together thematically better than most.

My favorite of them all is Bethouart’s Rituel de Bengalore, Inde (dark blue), which promises to “ease tension” and features notes of citrus, grains of rice, vanilla and cardamom. The opening is a bright orange-y citrus, already nicely sweetened with vanilla. The “grains of rice” join in after a few seconds, adding a warm undertone of nutty cereal grains; it smells like a lightly spiced Asian pudding of some sort, sweetish but not too sweet, creamy but not too creamy. Not much happens after that except that it gets softer and lighter and then fades away — it isn’t entirely gone after an hour, but there is not much left but a bit of milky vanilla with mildly nutty undertones…

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