Casran (2000)
by Chopard

rich, it's all i can say, a great perfume!

To my nose quite badly engineered modern oriental juice. It smells sharp, thin and astringent. Definitely much more feminine than most of its kinds. Actually, to me this smells a lot like some cheap mediocre female fragrance.

The most annoying thing in Casran is that the whole list of wonderful notes in the pyramid doesn’t fit at all in real life. I mean, I don’t get rum, chocolate, cherries, prunes or dates…..
It smells sharp and straightforward fruity-floral amber with light green accent and hint of caramel.

I suggest you don’t fall for that delicious sounding pyramid – it just doesn’t give you a clue how this scent actually smells. It (pyramid) seems to be very much of a gimmick.

If you are still interested and curious, find out yourself and see if you can agree with me at all.

Very linear and chemical. Feels like a chemical mess to me and doesn't add up in the notes. I don't get any of them shown on the note pyramid.

very gourmand and sweet, good drydown, made by Nathalie Lorson, of Kate Moss and Boucheron Saphir fame.

There are different versions of the notes: some include rum, ambered cherries, and chocolate; others, Moroccan geranium. I couldn't tell you everything that's in this one; but the overall impression is spicy and oriental, and maybe a hint of green and leather. This is certainly an energizing scent for me. It has a great deal of "presence" without being loud or raucous. A bit sharp at first (perhaps the nutmeg and anise?), it dries down to a suave and elegant finish.

I agree with PaulSC, it is also the first blind buy that i regret. The thing is, I am (as many other people on this board), use many fragrances at the same time, sometimes even layer them carefully to experiment. I tend to prefer dark and heavy orientals mostly, and I thought in my collection now I just needed something slightly lighter, a bit androgynous, and powdery that not that many people know of. So after reading the comments, Casran seemed like the perfect choice.

It is powdery alright, and something like-of-which I had never owned before. But I am disappointed with the lack of personality this scent unfortunately displays. Believe it or not, on my skin it smells a bit like Hypnotic Poison after a while (which I love as a woman's scent) yet it is synthetic in such a weird way. The opening is very weird, and the drydown is completely clueless. After the first 10 minutes, it settles into a lukewarm powdery feel, yet that one synthetic not is ever stagnant. The rum and chocolate I can smell pretty easily and benzoin is also present with the mix of the other two. At the end though, it is a dry vanilla scent that has absolutely no significant identity.

The thing is, it is very difficult to describe this scent, especially in a man's fragrance vocabulary of terms. It is just very interesting, and unique, yet I don't know if it is in a good way. I like it as something that I revisit once in a while in my over 20 fragrance collection, but a signature scent this will never be.



PS: The bottle, and the color of the juice is perfection. It takes a while to understand what the hell is going on with the bottle, and it's liquid lines. In that, the juice and the bottle match perfectly. It looks and feels like a jeweler's fragrance.