Salvador Dali pour Homme (1987)
by Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali pour Homme is the first fragrance I have ever tried that has made me recoil in discomfort, and made me want to immediately scrub it off. Within a few seconds of application a hot animalic note smothered and overwhelmed me. The feeling was something like claustrophobia (as if I was trapped within this smell), and I had to will myself to calm down and not head straight for the bathroom.

I don’t know what the hot animalic note is, but I can try to describe it. Other reviewers have suggested that it is a lot of castoreum, and it may well be, but it is the heat that gets me and that I want to try to describe. Imagine the smell of a pan on a hot stove with nothing in it starting to glow red; now add the smell of air above hot tarmac on a sweltering day; and now add the smell of the blast of heat that comes out of an old tin shed when you open the door on a stiflingly hot day. The hot note is pervasive, and warps the animalic note far away from any civet, musk, or castoreum note I have smelled up until now.

Within a minute of application, and after calming myself down, I began to smell some other things. The basil and sage come across as a kind of dewy greenness, which provides a strangely captivating counterpoint to the hot animalic note. The contrast between the hot animalic note and the dewy greenness is interesting and somehow calming.

The arrival of the jasmine and lily of the valley add sweetness and depth to the dewy greenness, and at this point SDpH becomes wearable for me. Don’t smell your wrist directly at this point, or the hot animalic note will overwhelm everything else that is present to be smelled.

As the woods arrive, SDpH begins to lose its dewy greenness, which is a bad thing. The hot animalic note turns all of the woods dry and almost acrid, and it is only the sweetness from the amber and/or vanilla that gives SDpH any life in its dry down. The leather that comes through in the dry down is not just old and dry: it somehow smells like decay.

Salvador Dali pour Homme is a confronting and challenging fragrance. The opening is a shock, the middle is interesting, and the dry down is off putting. I have left it on for three testings, and I am pretty sure that there will not be a forth.

Salvador Dali pour Homme seems to attract a lot of metaphors, derision and the like. It also gathers good praise from those who appreciate (smell) its virtues. It is like Hugo's Quasimodo of Notre Dame, outwardly ugly, despised and derided, yet to those who really appreciate Hugo's story and the character of Quasimodo, a being with a beautiful and loving heart. His beauty had to be appreciated by his acts, putting aside the "negatives", giving him a fair chance in spite of his unappealing "externals" and reputation.

I love Salvador Dali pour Homme unreservedly and write this review surrounded the aura of its dry-down after 12 hours of wearing during a good day at work (coincidence? i dont really know) and yes, with a biased mind. The initial onslaught of leather-funked lavender and bergamot definitely requires a certain kind of wearer in order for SDpH not to be described as "hot tar and satan" and the other colourful metaphors here. My first sampling drew interesting looks from my 4-year old daughter and my wife. I initially thought: "what the blazes is THIS???!!!" I knew i was at a threshold of my fragrance experience and was glad i crossed it positively. Wifey liked it by the way.

To be honest, i still have not been able to get my nose around, by note, any of the florals i know are in this scent, but is the floral sweetness in it, apart from the vanilla, that makes this scent wearable. In about an hour into wearing, SDpH takes a turn into a much more mellow path, but all i can smell (and feel - strange!) is leather, leather and more leather. The notes do not indicate it but i always detected (subliminally?) castoreum, a lot of it. To confirm this, i have sprayed some AbdesSalaam Attar Profumo Castoreum (pure and natural as castoreum can be, with birch tar added) on one hand several times for a side-by-side with SDpH and yes, that is it. That "note" that has been described as blood, hades, smoke and what have you must be castoreum infusing itself into the other constituent notes. Sublime.

SDpH is one of those scents always in my nose while i wear it, yet it neither cloys nor wear me out. Rather, it keeps me thinking about it. In that sense one could say it is distracting, but positively and beautifully so.

As already indicated above SDpH's longevity is amazing. It is still going on significantly 12+ hours after!

Many thumbs up to SDpH and to the noses behind the scent. A fitting homage to the man Dali.

It is very alike to Davidoff's Zino, a strong oriental and spicy fragrance with heavy tobacco notes. It has good sillage but por longevity, at least on my skin.

It comes to my attention most reviewers describe it as "black". I don't know the reasons for this, but I asumme it must be the way the bottle is like.

Smoky
You smell the wood burning
It is fresh, wet wood with green still on it
As it starts to dry a more rich smoke smell develops
It's like a smoke that's meant to be smelled, not just a nuisance smoke
Then a mossy dark scent starts to emanate
Thus you realize this fire is burning in a hobbit hole with walls of dirt, root, and herb
Intriqued you stepped into the other room
Now you're surrounded by an earthy, musty smell with a hint of smoke
The smells of odorous trinkets, furniture, and and halfling crafted fragrances mingle
And thus you sit down into a luscious leather armchair with a dusty old book. A crackling wood fire in the room next door


And that is what Salvador Dali smells like.

Absolutely entrancing.

Lol this fragance is so rediculous. Its conjures up an image of a fiery demonic cult ceremony. Very dark, and actually to be quite honest, the smell combined with the bottle are scary to me. The fragrance is totally unique to me and very interesting as most famous painters are. But in the end, its as wearable as Joop!, wait.... its less than Joop! (aka keep it at home).

This is so bad it's good.
Sometimes.
Now, where did I put that onyx dagger and the goat I was going to sacrifice to Cthulhu?

I think this should come in EDP!

Don't ask me why, if I told you I'd have to tie you to the altar as well.

Sweet dreams . . .