Déclaration (1998)
by Cartier

The luxury of this one is not owning it, Even after you might buy it, you smell like a well-crafted *cedary" teststrip that was stuck under someone's armpit. If "the height of passion is restraint," this one is being kept in restaints in a mental hospital with just enough fake citrus to prove that the cleaning staff came through. Let me out of this linear non-masterpiece that simply "passed inspection."

I completely changed my minds on this one
at first I liked it a lot, I found it was a new style for men
but the more I smell it the more I find it cloying, artificial and unbalanced
wearing it always give headhache and nausea

As much as I wanted to like Déclaration, it had a habit of going weird on my skin – there were unpleasant notes that suddenly reared their ugly heads. Not a pleasant experience at all.

In a nutshell, it smells like a Bvlgari but it doesn’t work well with my skin chemistry.

[Original submission date: 10 April 2008]

As with so many scents by Jean-Claude Ellena, Déclaration has an ostensibly simple structure: it's fundamentally a dry cedar scent of the crispy, crunchy persuasion, enlivened by extremely bright citrus notes and given depth by a deftly measured dose of cumin and leathery base notes. Examined carefully, the composition reads as a modernist gloss on the cumin, citrus, and leather structure of Edmond Roudnitska’s great Eau d’Hermès, made to feel edgy and contemporary through extreme transparency and the removal of anything remotely sweet. It shares with the classic Hermès a paradoxical sense of dirty/clean, animalic/citrus that seduces some noses and repels others.

Déclaration rises above the general run of woods-and-citrus designer imitators that followed it by way of its fearlessly stark angularity, its seamless blending, and its superior ingredients. The bergamot top note is nicely done, and the transition to the dry, woody heart is very smooth. The citrus notes smell natural despite their brightness, and the woods are deeper and more rounded than most.

Like many other Ellena scents I've tried, Déclaration is also relatively linear, running in its cedar-cumin-citrus groove for a couple of hours before anything else happens. Eventually the citrus notes fade and a smoky leather and crisp, but not-too-loud woody amber join the lingering cedar for the drydown, which is also seasoned by a just-perceptible hint of moss.

With its clarity, its balance, and its clever allusions to classical structures, Déclaration marks a climax in Jean-Claude Ellena’s “minimalist” fragrance explorations. His related woody citrus “Jardin” scents for Hermès do nothing to improve upon Déclaration. In fact they seem to me clumsily out of balance and repetitious in its wake. Some of Ellena’s more recent minimalist compositions may be stripped down the point of being bare, but Déclaration strikes the perfect mean between clarity and substance. A landmark in the art of perfumery.

This will never touch my body again. The first spray smells of mandarins and unwashed armpits, then after 30 minutes settles down to just unwashed armpits with the slightest hint of something fresh lingering on, and then long into the dry down smells like B.O. and barbecued beef flavoured crisps. I wore this to work, and thanked the heavens that this one particular girl was not working on that day. This made me smell dirty, and not in the good way like kouros or certain musc scents can make you smell. This was just unpleasant, like i'd tried to cover up an already existing bad smell with a really cheap smell. It lasted the full 8 hours of my shift, and the First thing I did on arriving home was shower.

I sprayed this on for the first time at a department store tonight, and I really regret doing so. The scent is very overbearing and cloying with a dingy-dirty feral smell. It reminds of a Tommy Bahama fragrance, but I'm not sure which one. These are the type of fragrances that I keep away from because of the putrid images that they evoke. I would definitely recommend wearing this on the wrist for a while before purchasing this disturbing concoction. Fetid stuff.