From the moment this email from Diptyque’s PR team popped into my inbox and I was captivated:
“The journey that Yves Coueslant, one of the three founders, used to make as a child on the transatlantic liners that connected Marseilles to Saigon provides the inspiration for diptyque’s latest fragrance, Volutes. The dominating scents of Yves journey are an intimately linked shape and scent: the volute and tobacco. Smoking fumes from the liner’s chimneys. Foamy wakes. Flights of silk and chiffon. Wafts of expensive perfumes.
An incredibly chic, mild and honeyed tobacco with accents of wax, honey and dried fruit distinguishes the scent, followed by full-bodied top notes of pink pepper, Madagascan pepper and saffron. Iris is also present, and brings the comfort and suppleness of very fine suede to these enveloping wisps.
Immortelle and myrrh alongside the tobacco give black, slightly bituminous notes. Storax, opopanax, benzoin do not merely offer this tobacco their generous warmth: they give it an unexpected balance and depth and deliciously extend its refined sillage.”
How romantic is that? It conjures up images of Titanic-esque glamour (minus the icebergs), of a golden age of travel where the East really was the far reaches of the world and getting there was half the adventure. I love that image of a small boy surrounded by all these exotic olfactory assaults – from lingering spices as they reached each port, to the honeyed tobacco favoured by the Middle East – which have stayed with him all this time and been diffused into one of Diptyque’s iconic bottles.
Once I had actually got round to smelling it, my love was sealed. Always one to eschew feminine, floral fragrances for something with a masculine kick, this scent is gooooood. Yes, the immediate hit is of expensive, sweet, fragrant tobacco. Mixed with what smells like a very masculine spicy cologne. I can almost visualise a man in a white linen suit, sitting on deck overlooking a Far Eastern port at dusk with a cigar in one hand and the spices from the market wafting on the breeze. Yep, you get all that from one sniff.
The dry down is softer; less spicy more suede, warmth and iris notes. It wears well and by the end of the day I was still getting faint traces of it on my skin, lingering like Yves memories.
The skinny: £50 for the 50ml EDT, £70 for the 100ml EDT and £85 for the 75ml EDP. Out 1 October 2012.
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