Bois Farine (2003)
by L'Artisan Parfumeur

Lovely comfort scent. BF like somebody made a flour of woods, almonds.peanuts, and iris and produced this redolent powder turned into liquid. Delicious and pleasant to smell.

01^st December, 2013

Delightful confectionery experience. Milky iris.

There is an Iranian sweet by the name of gaz, a white nougat with nuts and dusted with flour. Bois Farine is reminiscent of it, in many aspects: the milk, flour, iris, sweet notes. Not a grand symphony, but not the one-liner many reviews would lead you to expect.

Bright powdery opening, sweet woody-iris heart, clean drydown. Lasts 6-8 hours in moderate/cool weather. Has the iris caveat: smells like delicious make-up.

So far, the only perfume that has made me recline and laugh. Recommended!

26^th August, 2013

Lactic incense, iris and pencil shavings.

27^th April, 2013

Cookies and nuts and ..... wind. When you think of a gourmand parfume you wouldn't consider wind, would you? Well, Bois Farine is a gourmand with something airy and spacious. It's a box of bisquits, but placed on a table in the garden, under the shadow of a great oak tree. Doesn't make you think of a kitchen but of an open space. Delicious and classy at the same time.

29^th January, 2013

BF is an anisic and honey-toned sandalwood that is simultaneously dusty and creamy. The combination of all of these facets is likely the reason that it is reminiscent (at least to some, though not me) of the aroma of peanut butter. Unfortunately, the dusty quality in particular turns the sandalwood rather cloudy, murky, and ultimately unpleasant. Nevertheless, my biggest problem with BF is that it is outright insistent and incessant. I put about a QUARTER of a drop of it on a test strip, and I could EASILY smell it from 10 feet away, and that's not a good thing to me. BF makes for an interesting creative exercise (that should have been limited to the perfume lab) but not for a good and wearable finished perfume. Instead, I would opt for the likes of Guerlain’s Samsara or Chanel’s Bois des Iles when reaching for a feminine-leaning sandalwood.

18^th January, 2013 (Last Edited: 19^th January, 2013)

The smell of peanut butter on good white bread, delivered on the consoling breath of a lover in a meadow. Tahini, hemp and fennel seeds, hazelnut butter, honey, oats; it's a health food store who’s who. If I were forced to pick one descriptor? Peanut shell, which gets at both the nuttiness of Jean-Claude Elléna’s composition as well as its woodiness.

This is a mellow, doughy angle on the iris-and-cedar theme Elléna explored in the earlier Bois d'Iris for The Different Company (2000), whose top notes are peculiarly edible. Or, if the almond note here were amplified, we'd be approaching an oven-warmed version of Elléna’s L'Eau d'Hiver for Frederic Malle, likewise released in 2003. But Bois Farine is original, moreish and uncanny in a way that neither of these two are, excellent as they might be.

16^th May, 2012