Vetiver Hombre (1998)
by Adolfo Dominguez

Beautiful, sophisticated and ultra masculine. One of the best vetiver perfumes ever created.
This remains permenantly on my top ten list.

So VH apparently has earth notes, sap, woods and amber as well as vetiver of course.
This vetiver might be for some what they say “old fashion”, but it must be one of the truest green vetivers as well as one of the most intense yet fresh vetivers.
How is this one different from say, Guerlain’s? well, for starters I think Guerlain’s vetiver lasts longer, seems less about vetiver really than the sum of all its parts and the classy herbal aura of it, also it seems more into other “darker notes” on the drydown: tobacco and what not.
On the other hand, VH is all about the vetiver with those very fresh ,typical of AD’s fragrances water notes.
This one also changes a bit on the skin but it remains a true vetiver throughout the entire process, to various degrees of light and dark. It’s fresh all right, but it’s also very elegant, classy and “old school”. Very clean.
The sillage is quietly modest too.
I get more from most of AD’s fragrances in hotter and summer temperatures and this one works better under that climate, I think.
Will there be a EDP for this one? I hope so!.

Placing my bid on ebay I was expecting to make a good deal and what would hopefully turn out to be a fragrance as pleasantly fresh and clean as described by others. How could I have known that I would regain a piece of my own past, a lucid, incredibly precise childhood recollection released from its own bottle by just a sniff of this elegantly unassuming flacon of Adolfo Dominguez Vetiver.
The memory came on at the first spray, without hesitation. Friseur Gerber, the barbershop in Frankfurt where my father had always had his hair cut, and where he took me as a toddler. It was not just the shop that exuded the distinctive vetiver scent, but even moreso its owner, Herr Gerber, a smallish corpulent man with a slightly pressed voice and full, longish, but conservatively groomed hair, wearing a brown barber’s smock (this was ca. 1973), an incarnation of artisan pride, whose curious blend of dialect-tinged, common-sense solidity and a casually debonaire habitus could only ever have sprung from a most distinctive union of what and where: styling and beautifying, with great earnestness and ambition, in the heart of an old working class neighborhood, right beside Frankfurt’s central railway station, which was bordered on the other side by the then notorious red light district. He may have come from a modest background, but those click-clacking scissors wielded by a masterful hand cut through the walls of social stratification like rice paper, connecting him to the grand coiffeurs on the city’s high street, the stylists, couturiers and parfumeurs of London, Paris, Hollywood, all those who shared in the glorious labor of making humankind glamorous and beautiful. His vetiver cologne, so strikingly resemblant to the after-the-fact creation of Dominguez was a tart, crisp claim to an unquestionably bright future, while a lingering sweetness suggested an underlying sense of security and satisfaction, a beautifully crafted pas-de-deux of harmony by contrast. Ethereal, yet earthy, Herr Gerber had found his signature scent and would not hesitate applying it to his valued clients. Later, he would move to the outskirts of the city in pursuance of his dreams, and my father and I followed him, despite the long distance to Griesheim, another working class quarter. The prices rose dramatically, as did the status claims manifested in the debonaire turning into mere airs, fantasies, indeed, whose incongruence became too painfully evident as for all the soaring claims to classiness, the shop remained class-based in grimy old Griesheim, never to rematerialize, upon a wish, in Beverly Hills. So Herr Gerber and his vetiver disappeared from my life and recollection. Now that image is brilliantly reborn by olfactorial recollection and that scent, so light and intense, so conservative and unusual, remains, like the memory, for good.

It`s sunny flowery and sparkling Vetiver. If you don`t like powdery and soapy iris in Guerlain`s Vetiver - try it!
Beware addiction of it in summer days!

A nice light fresh vetiver fro the summer. Wonderful dry down on this one!