Farnesiana

An elegant heliotrope-y fragrance. It supposedly doesn’t contain heliotrope based on Fragrantica's note pyramid but it could be the mimosa contributing an almond accord. I strongly believe heliotropin is present, however. The opening is comprised of a strong bitter almond, with a floral nuance. As the scent approaches the drydown, it becomes sweeter and sweeter with vanilla, and transforms into a borderline full-blown gourmand. Although I am not crazy about the opening, I love that the scent goes through distinct stages (something I always admire and look for in a perfume.) Farnesiana has this vintage feel to me, as opposed to classic or timeless (such as Shalimar or L’Heure Bleue). Yet it still isn’t a dated fragrance. I'm honestly surprised that such a gourmand smelling fragrance came from the 1940s. The opening for some reason reminds me of vintage Le Dix. They were both released in 1947 and are soft, powdery floral scents. Le Dix is way more aldehydic in comparison, and Farnesiana has vanilla/heliotrope at the forefront. I find many gourmand heliotrope/almond scents to be quite similar, such as L.T. Piver Heliotrope Blanc, Mazzolari Alessandro, Etro Heliotrope, Reminiscence Heliotrope, Profumum Confetto, Profumum Dolce Acqua, and Calypso St. Barth Lea. But Farnesiana's glamorous vintage feel separates it from the rest. The parfum stays close to the skin but has moderate longevity. The EDP is identical scent-wise, but has better sillage, though still on the softer side. After buying a full bottle of the EDP, Farnesiana is quickly climbing up my absolute favorites list.

In my search for a perfect mimosa scent I came across this gem of a perfume. I have tried it first in the pure parfum version and I was instantly captured by its beauty. The mimosa scent in the pure parfum concentration is purely divine. It is sweet, creamy and very close to the heady mimosa flowers I used to buy in early spring. After my experience with the pure parfum, I had a wonderful opportunity to track down the vintage EDP concentration. And though the versions are slightly different, both of them develop into a gorgeous bouquet of mimosa. The difference between two is in the opening. The pure parfum has much stronger and almost sharp woody hay note in the opening. I thought that this is how mimosa would smell, if it had a passionate night with the sandalwood in a haystack. Beautiful, sweet and attractive but slightly disheveled. The vintage EDP, however, is more gentle and sweet in the beginning with a bit of a fruity flavor. After the opening, the scent becomes creamier and sweeter as it transforms into a huge, fragrant bouquet of mimosa in both versions. In the dry down the scent continues to be mimosa sweet and slightly powdery. The lasting power is a bit better in the pure parfum version. This is a lovely interpretation of mimosa flower. Sweet, creamy and voluptuous. The ingredients seem to be of a good quality and the composition smells perfectly natural to me. No annoying chemical qualities. This is a very special and beautiful scent for an early spring. Overall score is 8.5/10

Farnesiana is the perfume that taught me to hold my horses and give it ten minutes or so. It opens very green and sharp on me, and smells vintage to the point of wanting to scrub. This is when the black currant peeks out and tries to amp up and clobber me. But I was promised warm, Almond, pudding-like notes, so I forced myself to wait. And thank the gods I did! I sampled this based on reviews that said if you like Etro Heliotrope or POTL Luctor et Emergo, you will like this. And that's dead on for me. The green notes warm up after 10-15 minutes and you're rewarded with a sweet cloud of Mimosa-almond-hay. There is absolutely heliotrope in this, even if not listed. It's one of my favs and always lends an almond powder to my skin. This does smell vintage and I can see it eliciting the dreaded "old lady" remark, which I understand. And luckily for me the black currant dies a fast death as I loathe it. My sample does smell better than the bottle I bought. I know I have a recent bottle and it takes longer to settle into that cozy scent I love. But it's an absolute favorite and I'm sad that it's been discontinued. With IFRA and drug regulations, my beloved heliotrope seems doomed to reformulations or outright elimination. If you're a fan of almond-heliotrope scents, grab this while you still can.

Caron just works with my chemistry. I adore the whole line. Farnesiana isnt modern at all but its one of those rich grand perfumes that make one swoon or gasp its too damn much. Well I tend to fall into the earlier category and Ive had my ups and downs with this Caron. I tried a vintage extrait and it was ok, but it just didnt sit too well with me. So I bought a sealed older EDP and it was magnificent. This Caron is extremely sensitive to age. So If you can grab it unopened or stored well you will have an amazing experience. If its been used, partial bottle, or not kept well it may turn you off. Beautiful yellow floral, powdery marzipan likeness. Sandalwood and violet and jasmine makes it tick. Id say this would be the mother to Montaigne, as they seem distantly related however Montaigne comes off heavier. Works well in the winter. Just splendid.

Mimosa and leathery violet, powder and almondy heliotrope dominate in the beginning, but this EdP quickly dries down into a realistic, non-sweet rendition of yellow mimosa. It’s a beautiful scent that reminds me of springtime in the south of France, when the mimosas bloom. After an hour or two the base of vanilla and white musk becomes prominent. Toward the very end, a little sandalwood appears. Sillage is moderate. I love the mimosa opening, and the drydown is pleasant to have lingering during the rest of the day. On skin, it lasts at least 6-8 hours. Farnesiana begins as a lovely, cheerful spring-like powdery floral scent that gradually becomes a warm gourmand-ish musky one. I like it very much, and would enjoy having a decant and wearing it on occasion.

I absolutely love the scent of Farnesiana. The soft doughy almond with powdery sweetness of hay leaves me craving more, but I can still understand why some would find this lacking in their expectations. There is that powder note in the opening, a sweet, feathery floral with nuances of both sweet hay and Marzipan. I am reminded of walking in a field in summer, the sky hazy. Medfied, Massachusetts,butterflies and bees buzzing around the hay. There are times Farnesiana can be as good as a book for taking you back.So make sure you dress comfortably,, pack a picnic of favorite foods and leave your cell phone at home.

I can see the similarity with Amarige Mimosa which I already own but this is much heavier and more gourmand. The hay is very evident and goes a little way to lift the fragrance. The vanilla and opopanax make this heavy and really only wearable in cold conditions. The sillage is big and you could knock someone out if you stepped into a lift wearing this. I can sort of make out the sandalwood deep below the vanilla and opopanax. The longevity is pretty impressive as well. I normally like quite potent fragrances but even I find this too heavy even if it smells gorgeous.

I was lucky to find a bottle at an estate sale. The top notes are faint, but it is a beautiful marzipan powder, with a a sweet note, faintly bitter; maybe even doughy. I am glat I barely percive the violet note; I think hay is there to calm the accord; the rest, for me, is a romatic cacophony of all the notes described. It is b eautiful now, I am sure it was glorious, when fresh

Very lovely! On me it has that hay and flower accord I find in Luctor e Emergo without the cherry and tobacco. Very powdery and nice, with a distinct almond feel and a warm and comforting drydown. A very pretty skin scent with great longevity. If you love Alessandro and Luctor like I do, you will love this as well.

(Pure Parfum Review) This is an absolutely fascinating mimosa scent, its powdery, dark and resinous. Nothing smell like Farnesiana, it's a very unusual scent. Farnesiana and l'heure bleue share this sweet waxy vintage feeling that I like. On me, it is soft and close to the skin and last a lot.

Le sigh... It is thick and powdery but that just means you spray less... Its a delicious little pudding of a fragrance. Cozy and mild. Perfect for early spring when its still gray and chilly outside but the sun is just starting to peek through, like now.

Awesome! A very unique scent. Perfect for all times and places. At first you smell the mimosa, then comes the hay--just like fresh cut hay. And the vanilla softens both. Delicious!

I don't think there has ever been much call for Farnesiana, even in the pre-1990's era when nearly every department store in towns over 100,000 people carried at least 5 Caron fragrances. I don't remember it even from the days when I. Magnin had every Caron scent in production, including the fabulous parfums in the Caron lead crystal urns. I don't recall Farnesiana even out on the counter or a saleswoman trying to sell it to me. I was under 40 in that era; maybe older women customers were introduced to it, or maybe it was kept under the counter and they had to ask for it. Farnesiana was an unusual fragrance in its day. Post-World War II 1940's, certainly the 1950's and the 1960's were all just saturated with femmie little floral fragrances, and I can't think of any of the chypres sold in that era came anywhere close to the depths of Farnesiana territory. Needless to say, there was no such marketing of anything like unisex fragrances; men and women were forced to stay in their lanes. So I didn't buy my bottle until the dawn of the Internet, probably around 2000. My bottle of spray edp is in one of those tall oval clear glass bottles that has little round bumps on the glass (sorry that description would never pass a technical writing test). I think it came in a square cut heavy cardboard box that was yellow on the top with greenery on the last 2 inches of the bottle. I'm trying to be specific here because other reviewers describe Farnesiana as sweet, and the juice that's in my bottle isn't sweet. Maybe Caron has reformulated it? (I just looked; there is a photo of the bottle and the box with this listing.) The juice in my bottle is overwhelmingly dark, in color and well as fragrance. It's dark tan, and has been dark tan since I bought it; it was never the light yellow juice shown in the photo accompanying this Fragrantica listing. The top notes are all about hay and mimosa, and I smell heliotrope too, just like other reviewers have said. But very soon into it, the jasmine, opoponax and sandalwood take over. Don't worry about the violet turning sweet on you; it's there but you'll never notice because you're being clubbed over the head by jasmine and woods. It's a good depths of winter fragrance, dark and brooding, which goes well with blizzards and sleet storms. And it's a personal indulgence fragrance; I can't imagine using it to attract a potential mate/business contact/whatever. It's an overwhelming woody fragrances, which should interest people now that woody fragrances have finally now arrived in great numbers. And are jockeying for position everywhere, so it's unlikely most people will even remember any Caron scent, much less Farnesiana. But it's worth looking for if you're interested in worthy older fragrances.

I guess my tiny sample was from a vintage bottle as the colour was kind of brown, but Farnesiana smells heavenly: I love the delicate topnotes, it's said to be mimosa and I will need to smell some soon because this is lovley. Usually I'm a little concerned about yellow florals because they all seem so powerful, but this one is not. It's delicate and a little powdery. The heart is nice too, it matures with opoponax and I pic up the hay note. To my relief I dont smell any black currant. Not in the way I'm used to anyway. Only in the drydown I find the play doh note some reviewers talks about, and I agree that it would have been much better without it. I like it a lot and if somebody gave me a bottle I would appreciate it a lot but I'm not going to search ebay for it. It's not that special to me.

Allow me to introduce you to my new friend, Madame Farnesiana- she is the daughter of Madame L'Heure Bleue, the mother of Madame Champs d'Elysees, and the grandmother of Mademoiselles Mimosa por Moi and Kenzo Summer! This fragrance is a warm, creamy-powdery mimosa with sensual accents of black currant jam. It has subtle depth and incredible longevity, and an enveloping quality that reminds me of Aimez-Moi, another lovely fragrance from the House of Caron. Highly recommended!

Beautiful scent! Fresh floral and warm hay. The mimose is sunny and bright, buoyed up by the warmer base notes. Classic smelling but also unusual. Lasts well.

Dense, creamy, unabashedly sweet, almondy beginning, with traditional vintage purple hues. Above all I get dusty, floury mimosa that becomes chewable with moist hay and vanilla and makes me think of yeasts and bakeries. In the wake distant get a sandalwood talc, clean mosses. On the skin all blends into a familiar aroma of scented wipes, with a warm texture, and a gourmand wire. Ripe in the opening, rejuvenates in the drydown. True, direct with a cuddly finish.

A big disappointment. I thought it should have smelled like mimosa, this is why I was so eager to try it. Well, I cannot detect any mimosa in this stuff. No mimosa flowers, no mimosa leaves, no mimosa stems. Not even mimosa roots :( This is marzipan, or maybe even a kind of glue that was around in the Eighties, which came in little jars with a brush to apply it, and which smelled like almonds. Nice and yummy smell, but not something I would like to smell of. I cannot imagine how Caron, who created "Parfum Sacre", or "Nuit de Noel", could create a marzipan fragrance... Maybe it was different before the reformulation, but... who knows.

Oh, bond_girl, thank you for saying that. I have a decant of a vintage bottle and I was thinking that perhaps it was because that bottle had been mistreated (gotten too hot or something) that this really didn't smell good, but the first thing I smell reminds me of glue that's been scented to smell "fresh", and over time it mutated into the exact scent of Play-doh. Since you were smelling it at Harrod's I guess that's just what it smells like.

A daunting assignment it is to approach something like Farnésiana. So many elements of exception surround it, that expectations could not be higher, then, never to be outdone, in true Caron fashion, the reality of it lifts you off Terra Firma and drops you into a vat of unexpected abstraction where you have no references and you're simply in shock. You were expecting a gong show symphony and fireworks. It delivers distant harp strings, wisps of cool air and shy morning light.It's no surprise that Farnésiana was hidden and held for only certain clientele that walked through those gilded doors at Caron, no secret that few have ever smelled it, and no surprise that even in its most reformulated, modernist versions it could not survive. In true Caron style, Farnésiana startles you on application: It presents as a kind of muddle-headed epiphany that for some reason makes perfect sense: It is simultaneously nothing you would ever expect from Caron, and everything you would expect from Caron, without being loud. Michel Mosetti knew that a pair of shoes left by Ernest Daltroff were not easy ones to fill, and this was his first attempt at stepping up to his fate. In the world of 1947, the year it was launched, so many things were possible. It was the "Après Guerre" in Paris, Christian Dior had just shown his famous "New Look," and the very air seemed pregnant with promises. Michel Morsetti kept his by delivering Farnésiana, which achieves the eccentric grandiosity of all of Daltroff's work, but in ways precious few would have imagined. Here we have the detail of why it hit the bullseye. Nothing from Caron was ever common or expected, and nobody who wore Caron was ever anything but tired of Guerlain, Coty and Houbigant. When someone went over to Caron, that gesture betrayed a certain blasé grandiosity that comes only with living an exceptional life, a status that cannot ever be faked. To begin, nobody thus far had ever imagined a perfume made to evoke Acaciosa Farnesiana: There are so few examples of scents that have since dared to dabble in this persnickety hay fever-inducing note, and most all of them have delivered predictably mediocre results. As I have written in the past, Ernest Daltroff would most definitely have been seated at the "Good" Russian table in Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain. His mind was clearly rooted in rarefied soil few peers would share. Everything Daltroff ever did was consistently extraordinary. Gloria Swanson in "Sunset Boulevard" does not tell of wearing Daltroff's "The Black Narcissus" (Narcisse Noir, 1911) for nothing. She actually did wear it. Religiously. People like Gloria Swanson and other unimaginably sensational beings were naturally inclined to bypass all of the usual choices and adopt the exceptional ones that hardly anyone understood, and many people even hated. That's just the way the formula of individualistic exceptionalism is composed: It's not meant for the masses, in fact, oftentimes it's created to repel them. We see this problematic detail in almost all of Caron's scents: They are not "bait," something you wear to attract others, or please someone. They are a declaration of independence, and scarce few perfumers dare to attempt managing that. In our time, I can think of one Jean Kerléo who managed the very same prouesse with several of his compositions, but I digress. Farnesiana starts by unleashing the brightest, most delicate cloud of lightness, which is exactly what nobody expects. Perfect. It plays on by miraculously maintaining that lightness, which is also exactly what nobody would expect. A perfume that manages to be tenacious yet feather light throughout its hours-long evolution is not an easy invention. In 1947, people had nothing with which to compare Farnesiana, so it stood out for sheer verve, spectacular performance, and what was most difficult, persistent low volume. In a somewhat hazy atmosphere of pollen and early Spring chill, Farnesiana presents first as fluffy, billowy, allergy-inducing Mimosa, possibly one of the most troubling of fragrant flowers. It never stops evoking the vibrant chroma of yellow and the high pitched witchery of Pan's flute, but for good measure, and to never be boring or cause olfactory fatigue, it also never stops evolving; that long drawn out trip is indeed an investment. An E-ticket. We visit the Mediterranean coasts in early March, with their breezes of dusty, fragrant air. We run through wet fields of wood violets and lilies of the valley that are just beginning to open up. A powdery puff of Iris is never far off, we just don't know where, exactly. We taste black currant. Somewhere off in the distance we suspect someone might be burning resins, possibly in an Orthodox Church, but we're never sure: Alternately, we imagine a barn full of freshly mown hay. Nothing is obvious here, nothing is clear here, and nothing really makes sense in the literal realm of logic as we know it. Farnésiana was certainly not meant to be understood or applauded: It was very clearly meant to beguile and confuse...to be out of touch...out of reach. All of those secret things that only certain types of initiated people want, it delivers. If perfume houses functioned like literature, Michel Morsetti's first volume inspired by Ernest Daltroff for Caron would be akin to an unknown attempting to write an epic novel inspired by and marketed as written by Tolstoy himself: Implausible, yes. But here, it happens. A masterstroke.