Let Me Play The Lion EDT by LesNez

Year: 2006
Nose: Isabelle Doyen

Got an unexpected sample of this and forgot about it, then I grabbed it to throw it in my "to sample" box, but I noticed the name of Isabelle Doyen on it and said "well, it can't be bad", as I am a huge fan of her work with Annick Goutal. So I gave it a try, and... surprise! I like this. Quite a lot. It is something miles away from what I was used to associate to her name, this is a minimal mostly-synthetic scent – basically the first notes that come to your nose are Iso E, cedarwood, aldehydes and ambroxan - CdG style, for instance. As alfarom suggests on Basenotes, it has quite the smell of pencils being sharpened. And it's really super nice, well-executed (as you may notice from my "surprise", I am usually not that fan of this type of scents). I would have never thought Doyen had such a talent for this. It has the same exact incense note you can smell it at least two Goutal scents – Encens Flamboyant and Ambre Fetiche. But here it's obviously different – it's linear, geometrical, "harshly" simple, ascetical, meditative. And it has an unexplicable, really fascinating slight but palpable "vibe", which is not even a proper accord or smell, it's just a kind of a dense "cloud" feel, a sensation to be wrapped in a incense, vapourish, transparent but still materic foggy cloud – which paradoxically, you feel more clearly once you move your wrist away (or wherever you applied this). It's like if the concept and the heart of the scent lies in its sillage - in its absence. And that's why I named the aldehyde, notably the C12 - it gives the same feeling to me; you smell a "feeling" you get exactly moving you nose away from it, not towards it. Increasing balsamic vibe all over with a slight anise aroma, and it also gets darker and sharper as minutes pass. At some point, and just for a while, it gets unexplicably quite close to L'homme sage by Divine, which has quite nothing to do with this as regards of composition but still, quite the same overal smell (this may due to a temporary coincidence of the evolution stages of cedar, balsam, perhaps some kind of "fruity coffee beans" aroma together... or whatever, it's similar!). The drydown is pleasantly more "normal", balsamic, woody, ambery still with an incense vibe. Cool and distinctive!

8/10