Sunday 13 September 2015

Sauvage Review


Last month, I posted my initial impression of Dior’s latest male release on Basenotes, following the very briefest of in-store sniffs. Then, I pegged it as a ‘...very generic modern fougère: a fresh head accord of sundry hesperidic notes linked to cologney, dihydromyrcenol lavender, the whole thing backed up by some powdery dry woodsy-ambers and musks’.
Having had the opportunity to spend a little more time with the fragrance, I can’t say my thoughts have greatly changed, but it’s worth adding a little flesh to the above skeleton.  
The fragrance opens with a standard smelling citrus accord built around bergamot and melonal/calone (/vel.sim.) that’s tartly breezy. The linalool/linalyl facets are freshened up with a good dose of dihydromyrcenol lending the composition a legible masculine cologne character. This metallic coolness carries over to a fruity green heart that has a distinctly oily, violet leaf quality – an oblique reference perhaps to J.-L. Sieuzac’s 1988 Dior classic, Fahrenheit. Sauvage though, has a much more pronounced woodsiness, with plenty of Iso E Super radiance that ties in with a powdery base of desiccated woody ambers and, carrying on the laundry detergent theme introduced by dihydromyrcenol, clean polycyclic type musks.
Dior’s answer to a question nobody asked.

Nose: François Demachy
House: Dior
Release date: 2015
Notes (per Fragrantica): bergamot, sichuan pepper, ambroxan.

2 comments:

  1. Amen. I tried a spritz of this again recently. The initial few seconds capture my interest, and then it gets much worse. The featured synthetics wore out their welcome around my place before this was even released. This was a release from Dior in the opposite direction of my interests.

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  2. Hi Jeff,
    I suspect you're not alone in your feelings towards Sauvage.
    Not a bad perfume by any reasonable measure, but hardly breaking new ground.
    Thanks for stopping by!

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