Reviews of Bois Farine (2003)
by L'Artisan Parfumeur

An amazing and unique comfort scent - flour, sweet white flowers, sandalwood, and...flour??!?

Not necessarily gourmand - for who would eat raw flour? This isn't even the floury smell of fresh baked bread - no, no yeast here at all. Nothing toasted - this is fresh milled raw flour. Sugar? look somewhere else. This is a bakery, not a candy shop.

Ah, but certainly a comfort scent - the fresh start of a recipe, the beginning of a quiet afternoon busily baking. The fragrance of being productive and creative. When other scents give you the final product of cookies or cakes, this gives you the prelude, the launch, the mis en plas.

So rare for L'artisan to put out a fragrance that is so casual and comforting - this is a delightful piece. So sad that the cost takes it out out of reach, else it would be a staple of my scent wardrobe.

peanut butter and hemp seed oil. not bad, but not that good.

I’m still not too sure when’s the best situation to wear this...

It was Bois Farine that originally drew me into the world of niche fragrances and, months later, I still love it for its uniqueness.

Probably best worn for intimate situations (or even as a comfort scent), its warm, woody and creamy nuttiness is sublime.

[Original submission date: 10 April 2008]

I don't get peanut butter. I even went down to the kitchen to sniff a jar of Smuckers natural peanut butter to compare, and this isn't that, but I can see how the combination of cedar & a certain saltiness gives an impression of nuttiness. That stage was brief, to my nose. This reminds me in the first few minutes of Aqua Allegoria Figue-Iris, which I bought last summer (this one came first, obviously). They both have the same initial cool yet sweet dried-grassiness that I thought might be vetiver, but I don't see it in the ingredients. So maybe that's iris. I get confused. With time the sweetness concentrates until it's almost like a dried fruit. The sandalwood is creamy and gorgeous and eventually dominates. This is the kind of sandalwood you don't often smell anymore. It's just a sweet smooth ride. Bois Farine lasts much longer on my skin than other L'Artisan fragrances I've tried - my only complaint with them. I agree that this is a comfort scent. I'd have to be in the mood for a sweet gourmand to wear it, but I often am. The fluffiness of this one suits me to a T. Very, very nice!

Whoa. Now woodsy fragrances I like but this just not sit well with me. Nice woods but the iris heart smells like flour.

L'Artisan isn't playing around with the name here. There's a "flour in a barrel at the health food store" impression from first whiff that has put a smile on the face of everyone I've shoved this in front of. This is followed by what I originally deemed a peanut butter note but with further applications realized reminded me much more specifically of Halvah bars which are made of extremely finely ground sesame seeds and sugar. I don't know why but I have a feeling if I owned this I'd wear it all the time. It's just good mood inducing fragrance ingenuity and I love it. I think the inclusion of iris gives it an alluring and somewhat luxurious edge as well. The most amazing part is that the weight of the fragrance seems to be that of flour. It's weightless but present. Yum!

I can pull this one off easily since I really love and appreciate foody scents. Wearable and fun to wear.

Nutty and starchy bread-like notes (fennel) underlined subtly by iris and woods, it does everything I want it to.

JCE scores another hit in my book!

Very interesting. I`m not a fan of iris, but I really like the way it is done here.

Buttery, very very powdery with tasty fennel note at the top. I don`t find it especially sweet or woody at all, and I also can`t quite follow the peanut butter comments...

To me Bois Farine is a bit white bread-like scent, but much more than that, I get the clear vision of plastic bowl where pile of barley flour has been mixed with crushed, fatty almonds.

Cloying sweetness, uncooked honey noodle wetness. Unwearable. Made me and my boyfriend think of raw honey, straight from a beehive for some reason. He was repulsed by it, and it is pretty strong especially the first few minutes. Lucky for us it started to rain so he could wash it off his wrist.

I tried a sample of this last year and really really liked it - I got the peanut butter and baking bread notes from it and found it a comforting yet unusual fragrance. I am now the owner of a whole bottle and it smells different to how I remember it. The sandalwood is now the predominant smell and it smells more like a masculine fragrance than it did before. I don't know what has happened. Has my chemistry changed, has my nose changed or has the perfume changed? Whatever has happened it is still a lovely fragrance and I'm sure I will finish the bottle but I can't help but be a little disappointed that it is not quite the fab fragrance I thought it to be.

I actually really like it! I guess it has to do with childhood memories, Nutella, comfort food, baking etc. However, on the downside, I do not think is wearable, only, maybe, as Trebor wrote, in an intimate situation (although I would rather go for my Must de Cartier) - you cannot really show up at a party, or a job interview smelling like you have just cooked a batch of cookies - and the other thing - it does not last long - maybe is just me, however after 1 hour I could not smell anything anymore.

A very fun scent to wear. It's not sexy, sensual or something to attract others, but it sure is pleasant to wear. It smells like flour far more than wood and is pretty linear, in a good way. It's too expensive for its own good though, but it's very interesting to try.

Jean Claude Ellena’s creation of Bois Farine for l’Artisan Parfumeur is said to be inspired by the flower of the “Flour Tree” that is genuine to the Réunion islands. The tree bears red flowers with a distinct floury, starchy aroma. The perfume almost lives up to this premise, commencing with an accord of fennel and white starchy wheat flour going up your nostrils and you knead that dough or visit the local miller to pick up freshly ground flour. It also has an aftertaste of crushed raw peanuts at first – oily and subtly earthy, barely detectable aroma. However, it quickly turns into an iris perfume, slightly floral and sweet with notes of cedar and musk and slightly vanillic underpinnings, not unlike Hiris, which reminded me of certain semolina patties, and not unlike Bvlgari au The Blanc with its underlining heliotrope and white musk sweetness (also by Jean Claude Ellena).

I approached Bois Farine with a bit of trepidation given its much touted “bread notes”. I mean, who wants to smell like a loaf of bread? Upon spraying, the first note I got was oddly yeasty and sharp, and then it mellowed into a gentle floral overlaid with a light smell of Saltine crackers. It is oddly wonderful and compelling, and I found myself hoping that it stays on my skin for a long time. I then craftily offered my wrist to a male colleague (aka my perfume sniffing guinea pig) to do a blind sniff to see if he would pick up the Saltine note. He typically likes citrus (Creed Himalaya) or peppery (Ormonde Jayne Isfarkand) scents so I did not expect him to like it at all. However, he loved Bois Farine! He said that thought it was a wonderful scent for a woman and was something that “you only get to smell if you get really close”. As of hour 2, the sillage was still quite good.

As if all that weren’t reason enough to like Bois Farine, when I went to look up the official notes I saw that it was created by my idol Jean Claude Ellena, and upon reflection, can now see his subtle minimalist style.

Let me summarize BF in three words: peanut butter sandwich (no jam, mind you). But you could try a peanut butter sandwich and fail, in which case it would just be a sad gimmmick, whereas BF is actually a pretty decent peanut butter sandwich. Yum! I don't know if I want to go around smelling like I've come fresh out of the toaster often enough to justify buying a full bottle, but I'll surely give it points for originality.

OMG, this smells of dentist's rooms! Must be the powderiness of the talc on their gloves and the minty-powderiness of mouthwash, or something, but I HATE this so much! Awful.

Bois Farine is one potent and distinctive fragrance. The opening peanut butter accord doesn’t sit well with me, and bears a spooky resemblance to the scented foliage of the harlequin glorybower tree (Clerodendrum trichotomum), though it’s not listed as a note. I can’t detect the fennel, but the iris root emerges forcefully after a few minutes on the skin. The peanut butter effect persists on me right through the drydown. I waited but never got the yeasty, fresh dough accord that has generated so much enthusiasm for this scent.

My own thought is that the nut accord (hazelnut) in Mechant Loup is better handled than the peanut in Bois Farine. My cultural biases could be showing here, however: I think of hazelnuts as part of a rich Viennese dessert, and peanuts as, well, a Snickers bar. Bois Farine leaves me with nightmares of being pursued by mobs of hungry schoolchildren. Oh well, I suppose it can’t work for everyone...

Baron has it nailed! It's the scent of Chik-O-Sticks! (Those of you from outside the South and/or Southwest may have no clue what Baron and I mean by this. It's a Texan candy made of coconut and peanuts.) A gourmand? Yes, if only at first.

The sweet nuttiness with hints of coconut soons dies down, though, leaving the wearer with a positively delicious sandalwood base.

Highly recommended.

Yet another scent that is SOOOOO heavenly, and SOOOOO unaffordable. I received a very generous decant of BF from a lovely swapper, and in three days, have almost emptied that decant. I am now convinced that I need a FB, even if it means taking out a loan. BF is a perfect capture of that smell that flour gets when it has spent a few weeks in the freezer.... frozen flour. There's not a hint of peanut butter here, nor is there anything gourmandesque (depite the fact that it's a flour scent). It's a sugar-free, unsweetened version of Jour de Fete. I don't pick up on the oatmeal, vanilla, or cream notes that others have mentioned... It's all dry, cold (frozen) flour that *hints* at its sweet potential (like flour before it becomes a cake), but never moves past that hint of sweetness. Oddly, it's become my ideal summer scent, if only because it constantly reminds me of sticking my head in the freezer as a child, sniffing the odd melange of ice, frosty plastic, and freezer-burned flour. (Yes, my mom thought I was insane.) Yet it's surprisingly "cooling"... I haven't been this knocked over by a scent in quite a while. Better still, no one will KNOW that you're wearing perfume; they'll assume that your natural body scent is just THAT amazing. It's now at the very top of my "must have FB" list. (Thank you, dear K! :)
Similar (but not *quite* as awesome) scents: Jour de Fete, FM L'Eau d'Hiver. If you like either of these, you'll love Bois Farine.

I love this! I do get peanut butter but it works! fIt is wheaty and smooth.

This perfume pretty much remained the same from application to the end. Dabbed on, it lasted 3-4 hours. The main notes I picked up were iris and cedar; in other words, the perfume smelled like lavender baby lotion and cedarwood. Not that I'm complaining--it's a lovely fragrance. I'll keep the sample (and maybe even order another when I'm done), but I probably wouldn't buy a whole bottle.

Peanutbutter? Nope, I didn't get that accord - thankfully! - but I did get sandalwood. In fact; that was it. Smelled like Caswell & Massey's Sandalwood. Nothing else. My sample came directly from the N.Y. L'Artisan boutique so I trust it. Nothing but sandalwood though.

Feeling miserable after bombing a midterm, I went to my favorite perfume shop and asked what they'd suggest for someone who's been having a really bad day. I probably shouldn't have rewarded myself for doing badly on a test, but perfumes always make me feel better, and I needed a pick-me-up because I knew it was all my fault, especially since I would have done decently on it if I had only put in a couple hours of work.

I smelled Mure et Musc and Ananas Fizz, both of which were lovely fragrances, but I wanted something less happy and more comforting. Then they showed me Bois Farine, and on the card that I sniffed, I thought I detected hazelnut. I decided on this fragrance and spritzed some on my wrist when I got home. Peanut brittle. That was one of my favorite treats when I was a youngster. It's not something I'd wear everyday--it smells like peanut brittle--but I wear it when I'm going to be around children or when I want to feel like a child. I wore this scent to a baby shower just the other day and someone asked me what it was.

It is what it says: Flour and woods (mixed with peanut butter). It gets thumbs down from me because it is the only fragrance (at least up to this day) I am allergic to. I couldn't stop coughing as soon as I spritzed a few times on my chest.

Beautiful! Warm, soft, comforting, and yet, somehow fresh. This could easily be my everyday scent. It also works in any season, as it is light enough for summer, but warm enough for winter. Doesn't have great sillage or lasting power, but it is so unique and beautiful it is definitely worth the $$.

This is close to unwearable for me. I mean, I can't walk around my office or a club smelling like peanut butter. But, it's unique and intriguing and everyone should try it at least once.

I bought it blind because of its consistently wonderful reviews from reviewers I trust—this turned out to be an unfortunate investment. Bois Farine is a total disappointment—raw dough! Raw peanut butter cookie dough for about an hour then nothing. Six times I tested it and six times I got an hour of raw peanut butter cookie dough—then zip, zilch, nada.
The seventh time I sprayed the back of my hand with five sprays (I’m normally a one spray person). My hand looked wet and Bois Farine dripped from between my fingers, but with that I smelled something like what others seem to be experiencing: a warm doughy smell (yawn), then powder, and then a kind of wet cedar / sandalwood (yaawwwnnnnnnn). Ah ha! So that’s it! I have to swim in it for this fragrance to partially work. I’ve worn it, heavily applied, about a half dozen times now, and I have found that it’s a nice fragrance but absolutely nothing special—call me crazy, but I just can’t get excited about raw peanut butter cookie dough.
I don’t know if the problem is a weak fragrance, or my inability to smell the scent, or my skin’s inability to retain the scent, or all of the above. In any case, this is not a scent for me.

Bois farine is a rare fragrance that i didn't like to smell in the bottle and love to wear. It's sweet and generous, and I adore the wheat smell, which smells of kitchen and love to me. I don't get as much of the peanut top note as others, for me it is a more subtle wood note that underscores the flour-powder feel. A delightful creation.

Another different perfume by Jean-Claude Ellena.
Ellena has specific style in producing perfumes.
all fragrances have defects but L'Artisan's & Hermès's are lower than others.
it is acceptable than many people don't like it, that is very sweet, but IMO it's not repulsive at all.
Bois Farine is floral-powdery & buttery sweet fragrance, it is smooth & enjoyable all time.
Bois Farine is a harmonic orchestra, that Jean-Claude Ellena is the conductor.

I put off testing this for a long while because I figured peanut butter, or just peanuts, would not a good fragrance make. Well, as usual, it seems the topnotes too heavily influence folks' reviews. The peanutty note burns off within about a half-hour and what is left is a slightly nutty, warm, exotic scent with a sweet base of cedar and iris, blended perfectly into a fuzzy, warm, sweet, cookie-like accord not unlike the almond cookie scent of Bois d'Argent. On top of this there seems to be an exotic floral note, not really wafting, but almost grafted - or maybe glued with caramel - to the cookie accord, like some sort of exotic dessert. Despite all this sweetness, it's never too heavy or cloying. Needless to say I like Bois Farine much more than I expected. On top of all this, it seems very wearable, much more than these reviews would suggest (including this one). One of L'Artisan's most creative and interesting scents, even if a bit weird.

Bois Farine is the closest thing in my search for the ever elusive 'Holy Grail'. This scent emanates a sense of well-being, I feel I'm a better me wearing this.

Bois Farine is interesting, and although I like to smell it, I don't like to wear it. It's very, very, very sweet. I like the wheat note a lot because it smells so natural and fresh. The powdery sweetness, probably from the iris-cedar blend, becomes too much for me, though.

Fabulous scent. Very dry and powdery but with a sweetness that never disappears. There is nothing even remotely like this scent I've ever come across. It's scents like this that continue to make me hold L'artisan in such high regard. Superb.

Perfumery doesn't get much more creative than this - yes it smells a bit like peanut butter intially, but the doughy sandalwood is exquisite and constantly elicits compliments. This kind of creation is what makes L'Artisan so special.

Bois Farine is incredible. At first sight, I was sceptical: a very comfortable, sweet, peanut cookie-like scent that reminded me of a candy store. Nice, but can this be suitable as a fragrance? Yes, it can: the sweet peanut top notes change quickly to a soft, warm sandalwood / cedar scent. Surprisingly subtle, yet it lasts on my skin for hours. Another Ellena masterpiece!

Yet another incredible scent from L'artisan. It starts out smelling nutty. Not the actual nut, but the outer shell of the nut. Perhaps a peanut shell? Then it develops into a sweet powdery flour note with hints of sweet wood. I agree that this smells like bread dough, but it's much more than that. To me it conjures up memories of baking bread and pastries during the holidays. If you've ever walked into a bakery shop, this will instantly remind you of its aromas. As for sillage and longevity, it's one of the best compared with the other L'artisan scents.

Probably the most comforting fragrance I own. Unique doughy delightfulness. It's not fragrant-like, but it does lure you in.

Chick-O-Sticks, a peanuty, coconutty candy that was an early favorite of mine. The opening of Bois Farine reminds me exactly of chick-o-sticks. It evolves from there to a woodier, drier scent but that foody quality persists. It's one of the strongest memory associations I get from any perfume. The scent moves persistently toward sandalwood as it evolves. I'll echo others and reiterate that this one is very original.

I love L'artisan fragrances as a whole and this fragrance has to be my favorite. Yes, there is a nutty top note but that changes into the most wonderful iris, sandalwood, flour smell. I find I smell my arm over and over. I would bathe in this if it wasn't so expensive. It's only problem is that it doesn't last a long time. I have checked several times and I find on me it only lasts about 3 hours. I then have to reapply. Maybe they will release a Bois Farine Extreme!

I can say I bought Bois Farine on the spot after just smelling the sprayer. It has been in my top 5 ever since, and trust me, that says a lot. It's so original I can hardly describe it. Just like Marlen I think it has a strong peanutty-character but there's so much more to BF. There's bitterness but also sweetness, it's masculine but also very floral. It dries down to a kind of pastrie finish that sticks around forever, easily the strongest L'Artisan on the market. Just try it, if you like it chances are it'll become a life-long companion.
Masterfull.

Bois Farine is my favorite fragrance. It’s the most creative fragrance I have ever smelled. It’s made by one of the best perfumers this world has ever known. At first sniff, it smells a lot like peanut butter, but as it dries down, it smells more like flour. Flour or dough on a bed of dry white wood. This is, without a doubt, a gourmand fragrance, but it stretches the definition to an area we never think about. Flour, peanuts, fennel, and wood. It’s beyond amazing.