Bois de Violette (1992)
by Serge Lutens Les Salons du Palais Royal Shiseido

The first time I tried Bois de Violette I kicked myself for having bought Feminité du Bois a few months earlier. You know that shitty feeling of having bought the good, and then finding the better? I quickly came to the conclusion, though, that I prefer Feminité for most purposes and would choose it over BdV if I were to have just one. BdV brings into relief a feeling about Feminité that I could never quite get my nose around. Feminité’s boozyish combination of fruit, wood and flower expresses itself with a dried-fruit resinousness that I find nowhere except in the SL Feminité and Bois perfumes. Without using any of the classic perfume resins/oils (benzoin, olibanum, myrrh, spikenard, peru balsam, cistus labdanum) Feminité synthesizes a flower/fruit/wood that has the same stickiness and chewy quality that we associate with botanical resins.

Bois de Violette, while gorgeous, removes the stickiness of Feminité in order to focus on the highs of the added violet. The result is that it speaks in a higher, perhaps prettier register, but loses some of the implicit harmony of Feminité’s middle register.

The Feminité / BdV dilemma fleshes out an understanding that I’ve been coming to. I’ve always preferred the range of the viola to that of the violin. In the small bit that I’ve experienced of opera, I’m instantly drawn to the mezzo soprano rather than the soprano. The majority are drawn to the most prominent, the one that shines the brightest, the highest in the hierarchy. But just listen to Marilyn Horne singing Rossini and you’ll understand why I’ve come to prefer Feminité du Bois to Bois de Violette.

5th November, 2011.

This is a very dark floral as it collides with cedar and has the power to invoke a mood which in me is moodiness, not a desirable effect personally but very well done. I think it may be slightly feminine to my senses and I would rather smell it on a woman than myself.

1st November, 2011.

A pleasant, sweet yet dry violet fragrance. Violet candy is offset by a big, warm, diffusive cedar note with hints of salty spices resembling a tame version of cumin. The effect is like violet cotton candy, hot threads of spun sugar, and a blast of salty air--an incongruous blend that manages to succeed, forming something interesting that you have never smelled before and want to smell again (which pretty much sums up a major portion of the Serge Lutens line.)

Whether or not you want to wear it will depend upon your affinity for the scent of violets. My own preference in violet fragrance veers off the path of tradtional florals. As a point of reference, my other two favorite violets perfumes are these: the stems-roots-and-all darkness of Ava Luxe Midnight Violet (no longer available) and the one perfume that I didn't even realize was violet until I the third time I tried it--the gorgeous Ormonde Woman by Ormonde Jayne.

9th June, 2011.

Sweet, almost smells like a grape popsicle for some reason. It's more on the feminine side of the unisex line. The juice is well done, just not my cup of tea.

28th February, 2011.

Christopher Sheldrake's Bois de Violette is really Feminitè du Bois in a shroud, tightly wrapped with candied violets and cedar shavings tucked between the folds. It is the most reticent, quietly mournful scent in the Lutens range and shares an outlook similar to that of Iris Silver Mist, but here with laboured breaths and downcast eyes. Shunning the light, its violet-cedar encounter occurs in the shadow of a close leather canopy reminiscent of Guerlain's Nahéma, with the similarly alternating shades and textures of a leather quilt. The violet sweetness is dauntingly heavy at first, but is resisted and eventually overcome by the soberingly dry cedar. And there is cumin too! Sprinkled with abandon, it feels to me like the keystone note of Bois de Violette. In those remarks of Delphic compactness written for each fragrance and appearing on the website, the one for Bois de Violette reads 'An invigorated cedar'; that invigoration is the cumin. And this fragrance is Serge Lutens at its gripping, magical best.

21st February, 2011.

Beautifully-rendered, if not terribly interesting violet and woods fragrance for either sex. The violet in Bois de Violette is disarmingly sweet and cheerful, yet somehow darkened by the cedar, to the point where this scent seems to dampen my mood. I don't know if it is because the violets are so crushingly sweet, or that the ashen woods, which increase in strength after 30 minutes' wear, create a sense of overbearing weight and melodrama. Surprisingly enough for me, Creed's Love in Black is a more nuanced, complex, and rewarding perfume than Bois de Violette, and if I had to choose between the two, I'd go with the Creed.

30th January, 2011.