Eau Sauvage (1966)
by Christian Dior

THE icon of male french perfumery, whether you enjoy it or not, many have exhorted its beauty here and elsewhere and I won't add to it.
It's a french cultural institution, sitting at number 4 in sales as I'm writing this (2018), behind Bleu, Sauvage and Terre, it says a lot considering its 1966 launch that it's still this popular having survived and thrived through the power 80's, ghastly ozonic 90's, and the current "blue" chemical spill aka spiky """woods""". It can still be smelled everywhere in France, in the subway, in line at the boulangerie etc.. I sincerely hope it'll still be in the top 5, 50 years from now sitting right under whatever the ' parfums du jour' are
Vive Eau Sauvage

Do you like wearing limonate ? This a scent for you ,but not for me !

This has a very beautiful masculine citrus-and-leather scent to it that is old-fashioned in a good way and has a barbershop quality to it. However it smells almost identical to Capucci pour Homme which sells for a fraction of the price of Eau Sauvage. In comparison to Capucci pour Homme though, Eau Sauvage does have a more full smell with higher potency in the opening. As for the sillage, it is moderate while longevity is also moderate. In my opinion Capucci pour Homme is basically the same juice for a cheaper price.

4/5

Nice lemon drop candy for 5 minutes and then poof... gone. Pleasant scent, not offensive, but just not enough. I'll assume it was probably better 50 years ago. Will try this again sometime & see if it's any better.

Aug 19,2018. Will change from thumbs down to neutral. Upon second sampling with much more fragrance, I still find the top notes disappear 5 minutes in, never to be smelled again. However, there are some nice (very light) basenotes on this that actually do last a while, but it is instantly a skin scent and to legitimately enjoy this you would have to drown yourself in it.

Like the music composer Rimsky-korsakof, Edmond Roudnitska was a naturally gifted autodidact who delighted in subtle and complex forms. He may have been a great composer of symphonic perfumes but unlike Rimsky-korsakof, Roudnitska was not a prolific source of creative ideas. His complex and multi layered masterpiece of citrus - verbena - herbs - transparent floral and vetiver shares more than a little in the structure of citrus - verbena - white floral and chypre behind François Coty's cologne de toilette, Eau de Coty.

The main difference between them - and what marks Eau Sauvage out as belonging to a new generation of perfumes - is Roudnitska's bold use of hedione. This pale and translucent jasmin isolate displaces the lemon and sweet spicy focus of the Coty, it diffuses the white floral and in doing so opens up the profile like a paper fan.

Even if it is derivative of a relatively unknown perfume, Eau Sauvage is none the less a very subtle work. Today, it's difficult for us to comprehend just how new and different it must have felt when it first came out. Back in the 1960's, masculine perfumery was still "basically the barber's Eau de Cologne. There was the green, the blue and the amber. There was also Old Spice." This according to the president of the French Society of Perfumers who was quoted in a 2012 edition of Madame Figaro magazine. "With Eau Sauvage we discovered something quite different." Eau Sauvage represented a step change in perfumery, not only achieving a new level of subtlety but perfume in general was now able to express an ethereal quality that hadn't been possible before.

This translucent quality of Eau Sauvage can make it seem to disappear in short order. In fact it doesn't vanish but it does have a tendency to lie low. But what it lacks in odour yield is made up for with increased longevity - as compared to a citrus Eau de Cologne; an old French advert from the time reads 'Méfiez-vous de l'eau qui dort' - Beware of the water that sleeps. Sleeping water - a canny image for the pale and elusive Eau Sauvage.

Back in the sixties there was less competition in the market place and a masculine perfume could be somewhat diffident about its appeal, in fact anything louder than a whiff of Gauloises might have been thought unbearably vulgar. Eau Sauvage certainly didn't suffer for being discrete, it was a stand out success and nothing came close to matching its popularity.

Not only was Eau Sauvage a commercial success, it was - and still is - critically acclaimed as a masterpiece. In the book 111 Perfumes to Smell before you Die (Les cent onze parfums qu'il faut sentir avant de mourir) the editors of French parfumista magazine Nez selected what they consider to be the most notable perfumes of the modern era. Eau Sauvage is one of only sixteen masculines to make it into the book; it is the only one they describe as a work of art.

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