One of the first chocolate gourmand scents I remember really obsessing over was Eau de Charlotte by Annick Goutal, created for her daughter in 1982. The subtlety and delicacy of the gourmand notes were interlaced with cassis, mimosa and vanilla. It is a very French fragrance, the pale yellow tones of mimosa drifting across a breakfast scene of bread, jam and warm hot chocolate. Like many perfumes, it has specific memories folded through it for me: of skin, tattooed with random text from Baudelaire, sharing my Sunday breakfast over a rough-hewn wooden board, scattering crumbs over smoky trashed sheets. Kisses tasting of chocolate and Bonne Maman jam.
Will Cotton Chocolate Forest 2001
This may have been the beginning of my preoccupation with the foody, sugar-lashed side of scent. Gourmands are a much maligned family of fragrances. Everyone thinks of Thierry Mugler Angel and sneers. Ah, ye of little imagination…. Over the years my skin has been lacquered, coated, spritzed and doused in caramels, cream, toffee, praline, crème brulée, vanilla, coconut, rum, coffee, dried fruits, chestnuts and of course endless permutations of cocoa and chocolate. They suit my skin, I feel comforted and edible. There is the unsettling dichotomy of childhood memories of sweetness and the transformation of skin into lickable, sniffable canvas. Chocolate scents rock the Silver Fox’s world. My collection is succulent with degrees of cocoa, vanilla and smeared nutty expression. I want to share a few of my favourites with you; some you may know, some you may not.
Parfumerie Générale Musc Maori 04 Pierre Guillaume bottle and The Chocolate Book by Helge Rubinstein
Everyone knows how much the Fox loves Parfumerie Générale, a collection of inspiring and individual scents by Pierre Guillaume that has garnered critical praise and a loyal following. They have clarity and intent, each fragrance created using the best possible raw materials and glorious aromachemistry. His work is the marriage of modernist olfactory architecture wrapped around the most beautiful and innovative naturals he can source. Pierre Guillaume is a master of gourmand notes. His Praline de Santal is delicious and I can’t live without his buttery, flambéed banana Felanilla, a feral, slutty vanilla with gorgeous mucky projection. But it’s his Musc Maori that makes my chocolate list, an incredible photo-realistic rendering of silky smooth milk chocolate. You feel indulgent and fragrant, quite a feat. The beauty is in the use of Cumaru wood (a Brazilian hardwood which smells of caramel and malt) and the very subtle use of coffee and green notes to float the sweetness. It is very clever perfumery and a scent I just adore on slightly melancholy days to lift my mood.
L'Artisan Parfumeur Piment Brûlant
A near perfect essay on the history of chocolate was created by Bertrand Duchaufour for L’Artisan Parfumeur. Released in 2002, Piment Brûlant was inspired by the Aztec chocolate love potions downed by the Emperor Montezuma before he visited the women in his harem. It was said he could down 50 cups a day if he put his mind to it.
A rough-hewn chocolate note has been blended with red pepper lending the composition a bizarre red-hot and sweet combo like sugar dusted electricity. A really gorgeous silvered poppy seed facet mingles with clove and vanilla to round off this abstracted gourmand scent. It was launched originally with Olivia Giacobetti’s Safran Troublant and Poivre Piquant, also by Bertrand. The collection was called Les Epices de la Passion, all three fragrances promoted with an aphrodisiac angle. Piment Brûlant sits on my skin with a crisp freshly cut bell pepper edge as the scent opens out and this damp verdancy persists into the far reaches of the bittersweet drydown. The chocolate has a fabulous raw edge to it, like sniffing melted 90% cocoa, earthy and difficult. It’s a fascinating mix of materials, assembled with wit and intelligence by a perfumer who understands the potential oddities of scented juxtaposition.
Comptoir Sud Pacifque Amour de Cacao
I have a real weakness for Comptoir Sud Pacifique fragrances, they make me want to smile, lick and eat myself. I discovered them in France, in Galeries Lafayettes in Paris to be precise on a meandering drift through the miasma of scent and shopping cacophony. They are not for the faint-hearted; they ooze coconut, vanilla, apricot, milk, chocolate, praline, caramel… But I find them so addictive. They smell beautiful on the skin, smiling like sunshine. They melt, drip, sprinkle, frost, and smear….
Ice Cream Dona 2011 Will Cotton
Explosions of heightened patisserie memories mingle with tropical fantasies. You always smell amazing. I love mixing them, like cocktails. Amour de Cacao has always been my favourite. It’s like being drowned in milk chocolate. It has orange zest notes, cocoa bean and vanilla pod. It smells to me of chestnuts too, marrons glacés, or Mont Blanc, that peculiar dessert made with chestnut paste and cream. The ‘cooked’ milk note, like caramelised condensed milk or dulce de leche is a ghost note in many of the CSP fragrances. It drops onto the skin with a sunburnt quality and dries down to a comforting and moreish baked aroma. I love this smell. It makes me smile inside. It is a startlingly realistic chocolate, oddly clammy, addictive, sickening (yes…you can overdo it…) but then you just crave it all over again. I like the oddly synthetic twang of the chocolate haze; I will confess to be being a lover of classic smooth milk chocolate, not a huge fan of dark complex blends, they bore me. I like my chocolate simple. One sniff of Amour de Cacao bottle and I’m spraying like it’s the cure for all ills.
Thierry Mugler Le Gout du Parfum Angel
I can’t discuss chocolate scents without mentioning Parfums Mugler. Angel of course is a monolithic scent, a hit of fairground candyfloss memoires and darker, stranger oriental smoke and earth. Yes it’s sweet, but the addiction (and hatred…) stems from the genius melding of rollercoaster levels of ethyl maltol and slamming it into tobacco, patchouli, chocolate, caramel and a selection of dirtied fruits and berry accents. I love it, always have, it turns to bubble-gum and pipe tobacco on my skin and I perversely like other people hating it so much. One of the things I love so much about Mugler is the ability to re-invent the key house scents. Each autumn, Mugler usually release a quartet of augmented flankers, taking each of the four cult scents on a journey.
In 2011 they released one of their most dramatic quartets to date, a lavishly gourmand tweaking of the Mugler family, a collection of staggering intensity and depth called Le Gout du Parfum, (The Taste of Perfume). The quartet was a collaboration with Hélène Darroze, the Michelin starred chef. Fig chutney was added to Womanity, Salted butter caramel to Alien and red chilli (pimento berry) to A*men. A huge dose of bitter cocoa was poured into a tweaked version of Angel, (passion fruit made a huge tropical difference to the heart notes) and made the mix smell so truffly and so dark, almost like sweet compost. The depth out of the bottle is incredible, an edible, tactile cocoa rush that leaves you gasping. The original candyfloss and cigarettes scent has been rather beautifully transformed into a perfume of immense sophistication and sensuality, with just enough caramel and fruity snigger to echo Olivier Cresp’s original formulation. I love this version; it’s my favourite Angel ever. The original doesn’t smell the same at all any more, so I look to the flankers for glimmers of inspiration. If you can find bottles of this, I advise you to buy them.
Il Profvmo Chocolate Amère
Il Profvmo is an Italian niche house was founded by aromatherapist and cosmetologist Silvana Casoli. She created a bespoke scent for Pope Benedict XVI, inspired in part by the Pontiff’s alleged hankering for his beloved Black Forest. Casoli’s perfumed oeuvre is intriguing and varied, ranging from floral fragrances to gourmand interpretations, spicy and green offerings and interesting experiments in abstraction. Her Chocolat Amère works is a witty and handsome blending of materials. Like a man who knows how to put together his fabrics with subtlety and grace, the fragrance presents itself with warmth, passion and understated elegance. The gourmand facets of the scent are played off against spices and white flowers. The keynote in Chocolate Amère is the galbanum, the earthy resin that gives classic fragrances like Must de Cartier and Balmain’s Vent Vert their distinctive mulchy, green aroma. Cut with the bitterness of dark chocolate and lit through with incense and spices (particularly a lovely rounded sweet nutmeg note), the galbanum lifts the whole gourmand accord to an altogether more complex atmospheric experience. The dispersion rate of the structure seems to spread like the cooling of quality ganache on marble. I know a lot of people deplore the rise of gourmand notes in perfumery, but with studied application of chemistry and natural oils the results can be sensual and deeply satisfying. There is the strange struggle between comfort and desire that plays out in our mind as we inhale the sweetness on skin, be it our own or the skin we’re loving. The transition from a state of comfort and spooning to licking, and clawing can be shockingly sudden and feral. This beautifully rendered portrait of dark chocolate desire reeks of this.
My final choice is something that has vanished I’m afraid, but I’m writing about because it is so bloody gorgeous and one of my favourite choccy scents, mixed as it is with hazelnut, musks and coffee. Over The Chocolate Shop by 4160 Tuesdays is exactly that, the warm melting waft of cocoa breeze as you pass by a gilded patisserie. Originally a private commission, this compelling and sophisticated concoction by Sarah McCartney is an olfactive liquor I absolutely treasure. There is no more of it, so don’t go looking for it, there is a whole carnival of enticing and frankly bonkers juice on offer chez 4160. Sarah approaches scent with deadly tongue in cheek passion; it’s the only way I can describe her kaleidoscopic work.
Thus ends my chocolate voyage, dizzying and sweetly moreish. My paws are sticky and my Foxy study reeks of candy. Everyone should have at least one in their collection, just because ever once in a while, skin needs transformation. I often tell people (only half jokingly…) that gourmands are the perfect style of scent, they render us edible. We become delicious. All we ever need is someone to devour us.
Disclosure – From my own collection
– The Silver Fox, Senior Editor and Editor of The Silver Fox
Cream 1999 Will Cotton Oil On Canvas
Happy Halloween from ÇaFleureBon and a few indulgently sweet friends in Fragrance. From L’Artisan Parfumeur we are offering 100ml of L’Artisan Parfumeur Piment Brûlant for a US, EU or Canadian reader, From Euro Perfumes the Distributor of Comptoir Sud Pacifique we have 100 ml of Amour de Cacoa available at Luckyscent.com and from our own The Silver Fox a decant of 4160 Tuesdays Over the Chocolate Shop for a UK reader. To be eligible, please leave a comment with what you enjoyed about reading these reviews, perhaps a chocolate perfume you now would like to try of our Best Chocolate Scents, where you live and your choice (s) should you win. Draw ends November 4, 2014
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