Nose: Olivier Cresp, Jean-Pierre Béthouart
Dune pour Homme is for me among the most enigmatic and elusive mainstream fragrances ever made, for how it elaborates a generic “designer” theme in a fascinating way. It should be supposed to be a versatile, clean and “easy” exotic fig-green scent with a soapy-musky base, and it partially is so indeed; actually the smell itself is really simple, totally good and totally wearable. A gentle, graceful, mannered and slightly creamy fig-musk-green scent. But to me, and I admit this may be a totally personal perception, it has something else which makes it completely unique and, well, kind of creepy at the same time. That “creepy” feature is connected to its signature sort of warm, blurred and watery texture, which is due to the use of hedione and musk (ketones, I guess); it feels slightly humid, lactescent and “grey” too, and for some odd reasons it makes me think of some old, faded 8 mm homemade videotape shot in a cloudy, muggy August afternoon lost in the mid-1990s. The “analogic filter” role played by the film grain corresponds to hedione here, which is I think the key of Dune’s magic – a sort of fruity-watery-grey note which gives Dune this sort of damp, plastic, sultry feel.
This together with some more ordinary, decent-quality and undoubtedly “summery” nuances like green notes and fig leaves, produce a really fascinating “summer feel”, but where “summer” means “a summer of your childhood lost in your imagination”. Nothing crisp and realistic, on the contrary a blurry, cozy, faded souvenir. It’s like if the use of hedione and musk here gives the blend a sort of nostalgic and almost hallucinating feel which makes you plunge into your own memories. Grey, sort of humid and sweltering, at the same time “faded” and quiet. Out of all the dozens of similarly synthetic scents I’ve tried and owned, this is the only one which triggers that path of associations, showing how creatively one can make good use of synthetic aromachemicals (assuming there was an intention to be creative, otherwise I guess it’s just bare luck). Anyway, aside from all of that which is maybe just a subjective frenzy of mine, Dune pour Homme is surely a good, clean and cozy greenish-exotic all-rounder with a really respectable quality and a perfect balance of distinction and “safeness”. Nothing groundbreaking and a bit short-lived (as you can expect with these notes) but inexpensively solid.
7,5/10
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment