Insensé (1993)
by Givenchy

Insensè (original)

Insensè is beautiful. An incredibly compelling and quite complex masculine floral that's so well executed and perfect to always leave me stunned whenever I smell it / wear it. It's a shame that they discontinued it but I understand why. In fact this was one of the most niche-like perfumes in the mass market / designer range and it didn't have the commercial feedback it surely deserved. Unique, complex, refined and sophisticated yet not affected. In my opinion Insensè represents a sort of apotheosis of the floral masculines with it's tremendous balance between mystery and cleanness, depth and lightness, elegance and versality. Clean and soft florals and aldehydes on a misterious resinous/balsamic base. One of the best drydown ever. A perfect composition and possibly one of the best masculine floral around together with Caron's Le Troisieme Homme.

Recently reformulated and reissued.

20th April, 2011. (Last Edited: 26th September, 2011.)

This is really a very sharp masculine floral, but it's got a certain warmth that softens the sharpness down to a dull roar!

Seriously though, this does take some getting used to. It's not your standard masculine fragrance at all! Very, very floral fresh in the opening, but it does calm down to a very beautiful herbal drydown.

Very beautiful masculine smell! Floral, herbal, fresh fragrance.

This has over time, become one of my most cherished fragrances. Not just because you cant find it anymore, but because it's quite beautiful!

19th April, 2011.

Such a flirty, warm, manly scent. Merges perfectly with my natural body odor. I backed up twice.

26th March, 2011.

Insensé

What a bless, Givenchy has decided to resurrect this lovely scent!
Wonderful opening notes, floral yes, but male, it's is even a crime to compare it with Fleur du Male, (this one hipper clowing).
Feels like I am surrounded by Black current and Magnolia, really really classy, not for everyone I would say, as the scent is extremely exotic might offend some noses.
I am considering to order a second bottle ;-))) by the way

Ps: Thank you Mr. Daniel Moliere for giving us Insensé

18th February, 2011.

I lucked onto this one. I’d read Luca Turin’s thoughts on Givenchy’s Insensé and was intrigued though I’d never tried it. While visiting San Francisco I found it in a tiny kiosk-sized perfume shop.

Smitten. This is my favorite perfume.

One slice of Insensé’s beauty is that I can smell the constituent parts even as I take in the whole picture with a clarity unlike any other fragrance. It’s floral, aldeydic, ambery, woody, herbal. I can smell its fougère shape. I can put together the bergamot, amber and moss and see the chypre. I can isolate the cedar. It’s not the new-style cedar that was about to become the Lutens signature. It smells like cedar essential oil, a high-pitched timber along with a sharp oiliness that reminds me of the sound of an oboe. The layering in Insensé is spectacular. High to low: galbanum & aldehyde, lily of the valley and basil, amber and cedar.

But forget the bad attempt at description. The perfume you love sweeps you up, captivates you. This one grabbed me by the balls. Not my sole barometer of fragrance quality, but certainly telling.

Here's my hypothesis about Insensé. Yes, a masculine floral is doomed to failure. But it would never have existed at all as a feminine release. It would have been less handsome. Odd notes like an oily cedar and a bracing basil would never have been included. The reach of the florals would have been curtailed. Maybe it didn’t fail because it was a floral for men, but because it was the best of classical perfumery (disparate elements, focused complexity, beauty greater than one-note prettiness) launched at the point in men’s fragrance where cool met sport.

A note on reformulation. I believe there have been at least two versions. The first, in the Amarige bottle, is everything I’ve just described. Flawless. The second, in the rounded rectangular bottle, is lovely as well, but they clearly tried to butch it up a bit. Less aldehyde, less muguet, more amber. Still spectacular.

11th December, 2010. (Last Edited: 17th January, 2011.)

I like the idea of a masculine floral but the aldehydes in this are so bright and intense I feel like I'm being subjected to the third degree. An entire box of Tide bursts out when I open the bottle. Once I get past that, I can appreciate some of the golden splendor of this thing but until then it's kind of rough going. I guess you can divide the world into aldehyde lovers and amber lovers (or more accurately, aldehyde haters and amber haters) and you can tell where I belong.

2nd May, 2010.