Cuir de Russie (1939)
by Piver

A simple leather that just feels perfectly average.

Wonderful birch high note but it lasts only seconds on me before heading straight into quite a sweet powdery carnation, honey, leather melange. Give it an hour or two and on me it develops, with the occasional spicy note along the way, into something reminiscent of Habit Rouge but in my opinion not as balanced, interesting or sophisticated as that and certainly a million miles away from the masterpiece that is Chanel's Cuir de Russie.

I tried the re-issue and not the original/vintage stuff. I can imagine an earlier version being a fabulous 70's French gay brew, as eluded to in other reviews here.

I always liked perfumes since I was a kid. I always loved spicy oriental perfumes. I remember one of my classmates wearing Cinnabar. I loved it. I loved opium by Yves Saint Laurent.

When I was in my early 20s, as a law school student, I remember venturing into perfume shop in my hometown of Metz, France.

That day, I was looking for some heady man's perfume. I stumbled on Cuir de Russie by Piver, it was cheap, 75 French francs for a huge bottle.

A few years later, as a young gay man going out in Paris at night, I would splash my chest with that Cologne. Several of my boyfriends would do the same. To this day the scent of Cuir de Russie is stamped in my head and memory as my face going through the man's hairy chest in the hot summer night. Cuir de Russie by Piver remains the most homoerotic perfume of all times.

20 years later, I still have friends asking me what was that perfume you were wearing when you lived in Paris?

My answer: a perfume that smells of muscles, leather, the scent of manhood.

PS: the new version is crap. Try to get your hands on a vintage bottle.

Griff calls the overwhelming mandarin "metallic"; I'd say it's more blunt and fuzzy, like a skein of polyester yarn wrapped carefully around a ball-peen hammer. The carnation is squashed to a sad pink pulp (some of its clove seeps out, however, in the squashing). The rich or ancient leather-or-wood notes that others have found I can only discover after hours, long polyester-hammer hours, sitting very close to my skin, almost as though it were a postcard sent from the gift shop of the antique sawmill Quarry so beautifully describes. "I wish I were there, too," I say sadly to Quarry; but my nose will not take me there.

This is a good fragrance to have on hand if, for instance, you are staying in Paris in the winter in an apartment with no hot water, where you consequently bathe perhaps not as often as you might like to. Piver's Cuir de Russie is so powerful, so straightforward, and so absurdly durable that you will never walk out of the house feeling unkempt. Not fascinating, perhaps, but certainly presentable.

The manufacturer's website makes it clear that this is an updated version of the 1939 scent. Despite it's current Basenotes unisex classification, the manufacturer has it unambiguously as a masculine scent.

When I first tested it I didn't know what to make of it - honey and leather is an unusual combination. The scent lasts all of a working day, and the honey retracts somewhat, leaving an extremely pleasant sweet leather scent that keeps wafting nicely. I'm generally not much of a fan of rough leathery scents, but I am a fan of Curion, and now of Piver's Cuir de Russie.
Renato

This CdR has generated one of those opportunities to say I, a woman, wouldn't wear this scent, but I have to aknowledge its distinction.

When I close my eyes and try to follow this scent to its source, my mind conjures a visit to an old sawmill with decades of pugency. This mill offers historic reenactments, so I can smell the large metal sawblade glistening with oil from a recent sharpening, and there's just a bit of burnt odor from the enormous leather belt that chafes on and turns the sawmill's flywheel. I'm not sure what kind of wood they're cutting, but it has a mildly spicy content.

This is an attractive scent that I'd prefer to encounter as a foyer potpourri.