Luxe Champaca Eau de Toilette

“Boring soliflore that smells nice,” opines Luca Turin in his 2007 perfume guide. Well, that it may be, but when a flower smells as perfectly-formed as Champaca sometimes the real art is to bring out its voluptuousness without distracting from its natural charms. Nathalie Feisthauer achieves that here where many other Champaca perfumes succumb to matronly Lugubriosity. The packaging is of course in the Comme style, brilliantly inscrutable - an austere opaque cuboid in a disco box (actually two conjoined boxes, only one of which holds the bottle, eschewing all visual cues as to what the perfume may actually smell like. But the juice is lilting, translucent initially and yet totally unctuous and decadent in its later stages, acquiring a sort of rubbery (in the best possible sense) heft akin to the almost unbearable headiness of lilies whose beauty may be breathtaking but whose nostril-assaulting capabilities are even more so. Though what can one expect from a reputably narcotic tropical floral? From a respectable distance, however, which is how most of your acquaintances will experience it (and how you will too around the seventh hour) the tuberose and Angelica form a holy trinity that smells extravagantly floral without falling into dreaded Glade air freshener territory, which I often find tuberose at many price points to do, lovely as it is. Tom Ford’s take on champaca dials up the sexy vixen carnality from the get-go but then, personally I find it doesn’t go anywhere subsequently. It also costs more, and I reckon if you like Black Orchid and Lost Cherry you’ll enjoy this one too. In India, the Champaca flower is known as one of the five blooms that tip the god of Love, Kamadeva’s arrows, and sniffing this, one can see why. Speaking of India, a couple of years ago I made a trip to Jaipur, and having spent an entire day traipsing through traffic and dusty streets on foot from complete fear of haggling with the autorickshaw drivers, I decided to indulge my touristic fantasy of what India was - I treated myself to dinner at Rambagh Palace. Now anyone who has travelled to India knows the discombobulating disparity between poverty and luxury, and stepping off the main road onto Rambagh Palace grounds was like taking a pill that erased all sense of reality. The traffic noise evaporated, the miasma of dust gave way to lush gardens, and the moment I entered the lobby the most magnificent scent greeted me. As anyone who has ever been to a really expensive hotel in the east will attest, lobbies and washrooms smell different there. That perfectly modulated redolence that is at once prominent, as if to say ‘you’re no longer in the same place you were one second ago’ that goes beyond the prosaic descriptions of ‘clean’ or ‘expensive’ into the realm of ‘how do I make my entire life about this?’ It never gets cloying, but most importantly you know upon smellling it that you must eventually leave this paradise for the real world, and all you can do is savour it now. There is no use buying the 100-dollar hotel candle at the gift shop either; this experience will never be replicated again, even if, like most guests able to afford the 2000-a-night rate, your own home is probably a palace too. But I digress. What I was trying to draw parallels with, as many below have done, is that Luxe Champaca smells like how I remember Rambagh Palace smelling. Many other brands would have instantly marketed this as a decidedly feminine fragrance, but not Comme, and that would be a great loss to many guys who might never otherwise get to give this a go. The effect though, is admittedly Narcissus-like - throughout the day I keep wondering what smells so good, and then I realise, oh, it’s just me. The eau de toilette happens to have the same undiminished oomph as the Parfum version, though admittedly the latter comes in the much more spectacular step pyramid bottle, part Art Deco ziggurat, part Atari joystick, which really hews to the Era-transcending Comme aesthetic, and draws that link between Tamara de Lempicka’s society ladies to the equally fleshy bodies of Japanese female video game characters much fetishised by otaku. It was the bottle that first attracted me all those years ago in London’s Dover Street Market, and as untrained as my nose was back then, I sprayed it and knew instantly that I loved it (possibly because of my Asian roots) though it would be years before I could hunt down another bottle.

A beautiful rendition of the fragrance of the Champaca flower. The central natural Champaca note is surrounded by slight hints of white pepper, angelica, cardamom, pepper, white musk and iris. This is beautifully put together simple and very elegant CDG offering with beautiful sillage and projection. Very nice.

"Champaca" is a wonderful unisex floral, it is extremely well done and very unoffensive. Angelica really shines trough the opening making this rather aromatic and spicy at the beginning, it gets sweeter along the way, but never crosses the line of being too sweet as it sometimes happens with other champaca perfumes. The lasting power was astonishing for an EDT - more than 12 hours. Worth a try for sure.

Light scent, with meaty, slightly sweet champaca. Smells like expensive soap or face cream you get at spas. Perfect for summer.

This is a heady white flowers. I regret to buy it because it's absolutely not unique. There are loads of cheaper version. It reminds me a lot, to Avon Treselle. This is almost the same!