Reviews of Philosykos (1996)
by Diptyque

Opening blast is very woody, similar to sniffing the tree itself. Not resinous, but dry and very easy to see in one's mind. Moderate sillage. Woods cool down to fig leaves with hints of sweetness in the fruit. Certainly not a foody scent, but it isn't fresh either. After a few hours it stays close to the skin and keeps a warm fig fruit scent, very memorable. Excellent scent technically, I enjoyed this on warm evenings and comfortable days the most.

I am at heart quite a nature boy and have spent many hours outside. I owe this love of nature to early vacations I took when I was little, the Bahamas when I was three, and then Sanibel when I was four. I remember very little from my trip to the Bahamas, little bits and parts appear and go. What I can remember though were drinking coconut milk from coconuts that my dad would collect for me. With Philosykos, I can certainly see the coconut associations, but I'm not too sure that's entirely correct, the milky sweetness is certainly evocative, and if it really is coconut, it is a very pure and light one. I must agree with surreality about the banana-leaf note though, I would call much of the scent more evocative of the copious amounts of clear, ever-so-slightly-thicker-than-water fluid that drip from the cut leaf stems than coconut I think. I know this from tending my own potted dwarf trees and at the nursery where I work. It's sweet, but not floral and not entirely vegetative and not entirely pleasant, it's unusual. Here the milky sweet of coconut/banana-leaf and supposed figs or green tea and I get somewhat of a dry grass/hay which are all together extremely palatable. Very nice, archetypal summer in a bottle and great for both sexes (naturally). Reminds me of Hemmingway a little bit, with his tropical home. I like it a lot, but I'm unsure if my pale skin and features can pull such a nice sweet scent that begs for a Mediterranean style tan.

On an ending note, I did plant myself a sugar fig a few weeks ago, I will be comparing the scents and experiences I receive from the plant in comparison to this nice tropical (not neccesarily or entirely Mediterranean) composition.

Fig lovers -- this may be the holy grail you've been searching for!

As for myself, I'll be frank -- I'm still not convinced. It's like sitting under the shade of a fig tree -- then someone mischievous suddenly starts spraying coconut juice. Annoyed, your S.O. tries to ignore the troublemakers by cutting the unripe figs she had just picked into halves and throws them back at the misfits. Finally, they leave after being terrorized by the green-ness of the figs. Sadly, by the time you try to sit down and enjoy the scent of the figs -- you smell nothing because there are no figs left -- just the faint smell of leaves and the wood.

The best fig scent ever and I despised all the others (Dune, Priemier Figuer, Priemier Figuer Extreme, Marc Jacobs for Men, Good Life though was another exception...). The powerful fig in the beginning develops into a pleasant milky accord. Warning, this doesn't last long!

Leafy green at first, then figgy-pudding fruity, and finally a round accord of rich wood and coconut. A very nice scent. It seems a bit sharply green at first, but the edge soon wears off to reveal a softer, pulpier fig note. The best is the final drydown, which does last longer than I thought at first. The sillage on this is moderate after the first stage; and while the longevity seems better than the first time I tried it, it still isn't as long-lived as many other scents. Alas, if Diptyque could improve longevity, it would make their offerings much more attractive!

If I could only use one word to describe this perfume it would be: Nostalgic. One spray of Philosykos transported me back to my childhood; in particular to the days when I would stuff my face with the figs that grew on the tree in my backyard. This is the essence of fig tree; the fruit, the leaves and the wood captured in a bottle. This is not a perfume I could wear very often but when I do wear it, it makes me happy.

This review is under revision.

This is as figgy as it gets. I prefer this one over Giacobetti's other fig scent, Premier Figuier. To me, Philosykos is a fig that has just been picked from the tree, a touch underripe; perhaps deliberately picked at that stage to retain greenness. Then from the fig fruit, we gradually move down the tree, and get more leaves and sap on the way. PF, on the other hand, is like a fig smoothie with coconut milk and other things in it.

Longevity and sillage is mediocre by Diptyque's usual standards, but I can live with it.

the top notes and the base notes are wonderful but the coconut in the heart is too much for my taste
in the head you get the green and fresh fig (rather the fruit than the leaves) not too milky (compared to l'Artisan's one)
once the coconut has disappeared Philosykos gives its best: a perfect blend between the woods (cedar) and the fig tree's leaves
one of the most beautiful fig based fragrances

The most convincing fig scent I know, and a great summer day fragrance. Philosykos transports me to the Mediterranean every time I wear it. Remarkable in its blend of fruit, bark, sap, and sun-soaked leaves. Inconceivable to me for night or cool seasons, but a marvel when the weather suits it.

I just used my last spray. The bottle is now empty.
I have had a wonderful love affair with Philosykos the past year. I loved the earthiness of it, mixed with the unique sweetness of figs. A great scent for summer - but I found it warm enough for winter and night wear.

The one gripe that I have with it though is the sillage is not that long, a few hours max from my skin.

I've been keen to try this for ages, and I finally got a blast of it today. What a remarkable, multi-dimensional scent. Yes, the fig is dominant, but it's tempered by the coolest of breezes. It hovers around the edges of melancholia too, and though I love this scent, at times it also makes me sad, or at least wistful. In terms of longevity, it is still giving of its best six hours after application. This is a "must buy" for the collection.

This one is one of the best figs out there, but could gain or lose appeal depending on how wet/heavy you like your figs.

This one is very wet, very woody; it does for figs and wood what Voleur de Rose does for wet patchouli and rose.

It is a little heavy to wear in warmer weather, but is so pleasant in the cooler temps that it hardly matters. It stays warm and close, but never gets too food-ish, as do many fig fragrances.

For all around durability, I still like Anthosa Fig&Vetiver the best amongst the figs I've tried (and I was never really a big fan of the L'artisan), but this one is a definite must if you like the fig note.

one of the best fig fragrance. But, could be wearisome..

I would SO love to love this one – and if all these reviews on Basenotes are anything to go by, I should! I tried this one when I was looking for a fig-based alternative to my beloved Premier Figuier by L'Artisan, and Philosykos starts off pleasantly enough – strong, fresh and woody. However, after about half an hour on my skin it turns absolutely SICKENING and sour, very "off". Like when you empty out old water from a vase! Maybe it's just my chemisty... :-(

The topnotes: banana tree leaves. Exactly. When I was young, I used to have to prune my family's banana plants for the winter, or else all of the leaves would turn brown and make a big mess. I would take a big clipper and go at it. The juices that oozed out of the plants smelled like the topnotes of Philosykos. Period.

The midnotes: fresh figs, right off the tree. If you've ever smelled one, you'd recognize it. They don't smell fruity, they smell creamy/green. Just a hint of something coconuty in there.

I don't pick up much change after this point. The midnotes just soften and gradually fade to nothing. Total evolution is about 3 hours for me.

A remarkable achievement to be sure. No idea how Olivia pulled this off, but it is amazing! I've never smelled something so authentically natural. Unfortunately, I don't want to smell like a tree-ripened fig all day, as amazing as the effect might be. I won't be wearing it much, but I will be marveling at it in private regularly. Thumbs way up for the perfumer!

Wonderful scent. If you want something no one else wears this is it. A sweet scent but not powdery like some scents.
FANTASTIC!

Love the green, fresh scent of this one, blended well with the tangy fruity fig. I enjoy it in the fragrance and the shower gel version.

I absolutely love love love love love loveeeee it. My boyfriend introduced me to this perfume, by first buying me a soap and I loved the smell so much I just had to have it.
It is also great for layering with other perfumes (e.g YSL Nu) of course as long they are complementing. I just finished my first bottle and can't wait to buy another one and this time a bigger bottle. I highly recommend it! Go and get it right now!;-)

I love figs. Rich and sweet, but not too sweet. But like green tea fragrances, I get the idea that perfume noses decided they would settle on what a fig smells like and then make variations of that for fig perfumes. To me, it doesn't smell like figs, it smells like. . .dry grass and tomato leaves. I love sniffing at the bottle, but I wouldn't wear it.

I'm stunned by how well Diptyque reroduced the scent of figs. This is one of the most natural, fresh scents I've ever smelled. It's also easily the best use of fig I know of, although Marc Jacobs is the only other fragrance I've tried with a strong fig note.

I don't really like fig as a fragrance note, so this isn't something I would wear often, but it's extremely well done. Curiously, it manages to stay close to the skin yet last quite a while.

summer scent. Too light, allmost like green fields.natural.

At last I got to try this at the Diptyque boutique in San Francisco and it was a fantastic as hoped. I personally would not wear it, but I could stick my nose in a jar of it all day. I must say though that my primary association is not fig, while that is in there, simply because I've never smelled any fig with such powerful... sillage, so to say. I am reminded of the smell of a perfectly ripened juicy peach. But I shall not pick peach or any other botanical hairs in light of this wonderful olfactory experience, which everyone needs to and should by all means make for themselves

There’s not really much more to add about this one – a creamy and delightful fig scent that’s ideal for summer. My only complaint is its longevity, but that hasn’t stopped me from continuing to wear it.

Superb.

Figs are irresistible. Considered the fruit of Venus and Aphrodite in the Roman and Greek traditions, figs are believed to awaken a healthy passion and bring fertility. The sensuality of figs combines some ambivalence, just as sexuality can sometimes be both disturbing and pleasurable. And while the fruit is utterly seductive, lest we forget the leaves, who are responsible for the development of fashion for generations to come. And

This is perhaps why it took an Italian perfumer, Olivia Giacobetti, to recognize these intriguing traits in figs, and create the very first fig soliflore (Premier Figuier for l’Artisan Parfumeur). This green concoction opened with complementary (yet melancholy) notes of mastic bush, which accentuated the crisp and tangy greenness of figs, and was daring enough to pay attention to fig milk in the way of adding a coconut milk to the concoction.

But it wasn’t until Ms. Giacobetti has created Philosykos that the sensual experience of green figs was completely squeezed into a bottle. Anything from the very first aroma surrounding the trees baring the ripe (or not-so-ripe) fruit in summer can be experienced from first whiff of Philosykos. One can feel the fuzziness of the fig skin and the roughness of the leaves as they rub against a bare shoulder. One can hear the crumbling of dry wild grass underneath the tree as the eyes are set up to the branches searching for that paler, slightly yellowish waxy look of the just-ripe fruit. One can feel the surprising stinging sensation of the skin when the fig-milk drips from the slightly under ripe fruit’s stem, and crawls along a trembling finger and sticks to greedy lips and burning tongue.

Green figs are best eaten fresh. To be more accurate, they must be eaten straight from the tree, and not be washed at all. If they are dusty, considered the dust a gourmand addition from the earth itself. If the milk burns your lips, consider it a blessing of fire, as even the purest spring water cannot wash the milk away.

Many secrets were whispered below the fig trees, many warts were banished by the burn of the firey milk, and many summers were seasoned by aromatic green figs. When I can’t hop on the plane to pick figs with my brother along the sides of Road no. 6, at least I have Philosykos to marinate myself in, with it’s dry and green edible notes of green fig, coconut milk and cedar.

A for effort. The freshness is amazing, as is the naturality – one of the most authentic renditions of fruit I’ve come across, especially considering that the scent is entirely fabricated. This isn’t some shy, milky little whisp of figs on a temperate breeze (like for example that other fig by Giacobetti, AP’s Premier Figuier, which I honestly prefer); it’s like taking a big bite off of a fat fig-leaf and feeling the sap sting your tongue. This fig is green, fresh, raw and crisp, a bit more on the masculine side, perhaps. But while I can appreciate it as a work of art, I just don’t like it all that much as a fragrance to wear. It’s best suited to analyze and admire – and you have to be quick about it too, because it’s gone within two hours.

There is a pristine, natural, yet earthy feel to Philosykos. It is quite simple as a concept and a fragrance, but is not simple in the making or the accomplishment. This is not the fig of the processed fruit; this is the fig of the wood and leaf. Its essence is green, delicate, and pure. Its purpose is archetypical: belonging, awareness, and contemplation. This is the distilled spirit of fig—a Garden of Eden fragrance.

Philosikos is an identical interpretation of a FIG tree, the tree's milk and the tree's fruit, so forget the fruit itself(which btw in a perfume can be overly sweet, sticky and cloying), this scent feels like laying under the fig tree in a hot summer day. Greenish fragrance, with a hint of coconut (Ever broken a leaf from a fig?)and just a hint of white cedar (freshly cut cedar tree or sawdust if you like) A great and unique fragrance, not many fragrances in the today's market smell like Philosykos!

*Philosykos* starts of with a vegetal leafy greenness that is persistently but unobtrusively astringent and that captures better the complexity and totality of the fig tree's various scent possibilities--fruit, wood, and leaves--than any of the other fig fragrance on the market. While many fig-based fragrances can often seem leaden, the figginess of *Philosykos* is, from start to finish, handled with such aplomb, with such a lightness of touch that one marvels at how it simultaneously manages to remain fully present yet understated. The only other master perfumer who does this consistently with ingredients is Jean-Claude Ellena--I am thinking especially of the vetiver note in his Vétiver Tonka--and, yes, Olivia Giacobetti was already, IMO, when she created *Philosykos* at the age of twenty three a master perfumer. It’s remarkable to consider that just two years earlier, at the age of twenty one, she had created another marvel, the first truly fig-based fragrance, L’Artisan Parfumeur’s *Premier Figuier*, her first major fragrance if I’m not mistaken.

As the initial top notes of *Philosykos* dry out, the middle notes reveal a fig accord that is rounded off with a hint of creaminess that some have a called a “coconut” note. While there’s certainly no coconut oil present in *Philosykos*--it smell nothing like those highly aromatic sun tanning lotions loaded with “coconut” fragrance--“coconut” is a good descriptor of this particular type of creaminess which functions in *Philosykos* to keep the leafy astringency in check. Early into the middle note phase of the drydown, there also appears what some have called a “peach note”, though I tend to experience it more as a nectarine note, which, like the coconut note, functions to keep the leafy astringency in check but also keeps the fig note buoyant and stops it from becoming leaden and oily as tends to happen in many less deftly handled fig-based fragrances.

Well into the drydown, the astringent vegetal figginess begins to abate and is replaced by a basenote accord that’s light and sunny, musky and figgy at the same time, but it’s a muskiness that's not really derived from any animal musk; it's more of a non-animalic white musk, but even that’s not a sufficient description; it’s not really a white musk. One might even go so far as to say that it’s more of a fully mellowed out figgy lavender note, without any of lavender’s sharpness present; that is, it smells only like the memory of a beautiful fully mellowed-out lavender note with traces of fig. I am thinking, here, especially of the way D’Orsay’s *Arome 3* lavender note mellows out to become something more than just the aromatic sharpness of the initial lavender. *Philosykos’ drydown is a lot of things, but more than anything else it’s joyous, transparent, and transcendent.

Finally, don’t look for the white cedar (Thuja occidentalis) listed in Diptyque’s official description of this scent to make an appearance in the basenotes. White cedar is nothing like the Texas Cedar or Atlas Cedar notes that are used frequently in men’s fragrances as standard basenotes. White cedar, or cedar leaf oil as it is commonly known, can be pungent and balsamic, bitter, sharp and fresh, and even camphoraceous. It is a principle ingredient in Vicks Vap-O-Rub©. The white cedar is more than likely used to give complexity and amplitude to fig note effects in *Philosykos*, which achieves such effects so artlessly. Such an achievement is even more laudable when one remembers that there is no such thing as fig essential oil or even fig leaf oil. Fig leaves are abrasive and sticky and have a sappy, milky liquid in them that is an irritant, and they don't smell figgy at all. In fact, figs themselves don’t smell figgy. The tend to have a bland, barely detectable vegetal smell to them. It’s only in the preserving of figs in jams that the aroma we identify as a fig is brought out and intensified, and so it’s important to note that the complex fig note one smells in *Philosykos* is a marvel of aromachemical invention and Olivia Giacobetti’s art, and *Philosykos* is the paragon of such invention and art.

While science and art are definitely behind the genesis of this paragon, the experience of *Philosykos* is the experience of Nature, of airy, fleeting summer fruit and vegetal greenness softened, mellowed, transfigured, purified, and made white by late afternoon Mediterranean wind and sun. It is the fig tree, its fruit, and its leaves magically transformed into breath.

I've never found a better fig than this. It's the whole tree, leaves, bark and all - evocative and gorgeous.

Regardless of what one thinks of other fragrances from the Diptyque line, EVERYone loves Philosykos, right? Right? Wrong! Argh, what is it with Diptyques that causes me to block on them so badly and miss what so many others seem to be enjoying?! When it comes to figs, I'm a L'Artisan Premier Figieur kind of girl, yet open to other interpretations of this stellar fruit, which I've kind of been in love with since childhood. And Premier, like Philosykos, is green fig, not ripe fig, not the honeyish variety you find in other scents such as Balenciaga Cristobal. So I'm okay with the green fig thing. Philosykos, though, is just TOO green, too thin and - nail in the coffin - weirdly sweet in the drydown, a little powdery-sickly sweet and so not what I think of fig as being. Drat! I had a chance recently to buy a bottle of this at such a good price; a boutique near me was going out of business and selling off a few Diptyque SKUs. Cut-rate Philosykos was right there in front of me and I still couldn't/wouldn't take the bait. I realized from that experience that Diptyques and I will never see eye-to-eye.

The best fig leaf scent. Grassy, delicious. Phylosikos was the first fig perfume I ever bought and the only one I still wear - after trying all the possible variations of fig based parfumes I can say without a doubt that this is perfection in a bottle...

The first sniff of this was an emotional experience. One minute I was in the store Space NK in Manchester, the next I was picking figs from my uncle's fig tree on a hot dusty summer day in Cyprus. A memory in a bottle. I can even forgive it for its feeble staying power. I haven't been to Cyprus in 6 years, but whenever I want to back, I reach for that little bottle in the bathroom cupboard.

I purchased Philosykos because the Figiuer Diptyque candle is my favorite, but Philosykos disapperas on my skin. The topnotes are superb-- lush, sappy, green fig and coconut. After that I get nothing. My skin chemistry really sucks (or sucks up) sometimes. Philosykos lasts an hour on me, others agree. I think it would smell great though on somebody else.

Diptyque's finest and definitely one of the best figs on the market. I'd say it's only competitor is L'Artisans Premier Figuier. Whilst the later is drier, a little almondy and a tad more feminine, Philosykos plays heavily on the added
buttery sweetness of coconut and a terrific cedar anchoring the composition. Great scent with great graphic packaging like all launches from this interesting french house.

The perfect fig leaf and fig scent. Only Jo Malone comes close (and JM is a bit more floral fig to my nose but I like both and I prefer this one).

The crown jewel in the Diptyque family, this one is excellent for warmer weather. Its sweet and juicy, but not cloying. It settles quite nicely into aforementioned hints of coconut and very soft wood. Its the best fig scent on the market and wears well for both men and women.

Ny first Diptyque, a wondrful scent, can't go wrong with this one, something special

This is a really nice fig scent. It develops from green and juicy to a nice woodsy scent, which has the slightest hint of coconut. Not as sweet and coconutty as L'Artesan's Premier Figuier. Also lasts a good time.

Truly the scent of sun drenched figs on a humid summer dawn. Not at all strong and heady, but rather rides close and wafts softly up as the day progresses. Masterful in its simplicity.