With "Traversée du Bosphore", Bertrand Duchaufour innovates again, creating the first "gourmand leather" fragrance in the history of perfumery. Leather notes and sweet fruity notes were used several times together in the past, but the new direction was never that obvious as the perfumer has recently demonstrated through his alluring creation. Strong, pungent and often animalic (castoreum) these notes were rarely delicate before the major introduction of the suede note by Serge Lutens. The new perfume from Artisan Parfumeur blurs the lines between the families (oriental, fruity gourmand and leather) creating an outstanding new direction. This approach is not new in nature - smell the devastating osmanthus absolute and you'll feel both the soft leather and the fruity apricot together in an unusual marriage. Traversée du Bosphore is the olfactory representation of the velvety touch of a white peach that tastes like a loukoum. It is also the representation of the delicate "skin" surrounding some fruits or oriental pastry. They look like a "solid" but beneath the "skin" you find the honeyed liquor and the explosion of creamy notes. This leather is so delicate like the fragile and almost transparent layers of phyllo dough used in the delicious baklava served to sultans.
Something inside the perfume, the combination of vanilla, spices and a specific fruity note, reminds me of the very beautiful "Le Fruit Défendu" but the perfumer assured me he did not know this Paul Poiret perfume. But we could not omit the Pasha of Fashion, the great Poiret and his astonishing perfumes and the interpretation of the Orient.
The core of the perfume is a silky woody note built around the orris concrete with a touch of cedar Atlas but its modern smoothness, as expressed in Dior Homme, has been reinterpreted in a new way. A floral fresh note built around the rose is the receptacle of the delicious fruity notes - an acid flamboyant grenade note (a very original addition to the floral-leather-gourmand structure), a very fresh apple note like the one found in the chicha, the loukoum with a honeyed - orange flower facet, the almond-pistachio and a raspberry.
Most surprising, this perfume is also an olfactory study in the order of monocotyledonous flowering plants (Liliales and Zingiberales) with a focus on Iridaceae. Here you have tulip, ginger, orris, saffron, etc, all delicately related through their scent but also through phylogeny.
With an impressive amount of vanilla (maybe 10%) Traversée du Bosphore doesn't feel like an Oriental - its more its breeze retained in precious leather gloves powdered with orris to resemble a loukoum. It is the orris, the saffron and the ginger that are working like a magic powder reversing the place, usually attributed to sweet vanilla and benzoin.
This is not the vision of Orient as portrayed by Serge Lutens, opulent, dark and very deep, and not the portrait of bazaars, but a description of a Turkish delight in the most unexpected way. This is the delicacy found in the precious silks, the floral embroideries of the Ottoman court, the garden of pleasures at Topkapi but also the delicacy of tulips - the precious bulbs treasured by the sultans with their shape translated into the silk turbans.
If Ottoman tulips, with their precious bulbs and thick petals, had a scent this would be Traversée du Bosphore infused with an airy green - saffron touch. That's how the Topkapi palace used to be - beneath the perceived threat there was the delicacy, the precious scents and the love of beauty.
"The Harem Servant Girl" (1874) is a painting from Paul Desiré Trouillebert and it fully reflects the mysterious facet of this new Artisan Parfumeur fragrance - the gold for saffron, the white milky skin for the powdery sweet orris, the blue silk for the blue ginger (but also the petals of the orris) and then the chicha with its unmistakable fresh apple tobacco note. The loukoum is of course ... the forbidden kiss.
Notice also that the first painting was the orientalist interpretation of western artists - Topkapi was not a place of orgies - and this is a long story about how the West imagined the private life inside the Ottoman Empire.
"The Harem Servant Girl" (1874) is a painting from Paul Desiré Trouillebert and it fully reflects the mysterious facet of this new Artisan Parfumeur fragrance - the gold for saffron, the white milky skin for the powdery sweet orris, the blue silk for the blue ginger (but also the petals of the orris) and then the chicha with its unmistakable fresh apple tobacco note. The loukoum is of course ... the forbidden kiss.
Notice also that the first painting was the orientalist interpretation of western artists - Topkapi was not a place of orgies - and this is a long story about how the West imagined the private life inside the Ottoman Empire.
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Fragrance is the 8th Art - Octavian Coifan - Le Parfum est le 8ème Art
