Mensonge

I'm not getting what the other reviewers and olfactory pyramid says. Smells like a very fresh, transparent, cucumber type smell. A bit of citrus. I don't get any of the other notes...hmmm. I'll have to try it again later. Scent: 7 / Sillage: 6.5 / Longevity: 6.5

I was given a bottle of Mensonge by my parents for Hanukkah in 2009. I wore it a few times, decided I profoundly did not like it, and then it disappeared into storage for the better part of seventeen years. I have now rediscovered the exact same bottle. Fresh, as I remember it, Mensonge was an extraordinarily eccentric composition. The cedarwood, resinous facets, clove, nutmeg, pine resin, cardamom and other spices combined in a way that kept veering between Christmas, savory spice cupboard, and most unfortunately, pine-box coffin. There was something almost embalming about the combination of sharp wood, resin and medicinal spice. It was not merely “woody-spicy”; it had a strangely funerary physicality to it. Seventeen years have been remarkably kind to it. The citrus opening is noticeably flatter now, but this is actually an improvement. The sharp terpenic edges of the cedar/resin/spice complex have mellowed considerably, and what remains is softer, rounder and much more integrated. I now get dry aromatic woods, warm spice, lavender, vetiver and a peculiar savory undertone rather than the alarming pine-and-embalming association I remembered. It is still very strange. Let’s face it, the heart is bonkers- Caraway, celery seed, clove and nutmeg are not exactly a conventional masculine heart, and at moments it still suggests someone seasoning dinner in a gentleman’s dressing room. But I appreciate its oddness much more at forty than I did at twenty-three. I would not call it beautiful in any conventional sense. I would call it distinctive, idiosyncratic, slightly archaic, and far more interesting than most men’s fragrances of its period, even from Fragonard. This particular bottle now has the added pleasure of being an olfactory time capsule. It’s the same EdC, the same liquid, but both it and I have aged seventeen years. A considerable improvement.