Reviews of Piper Nigrum (1999)
by Lorenzo Villoresi

I was expecting a fresh peppery perfume from Lorenzo Villoresi's Piper Nigrum but instead, in the top and middle notes I experienced mostly whiffs of pungently fresh oregano and thyme. Piper Nigrum is one of the more astringent fragrances I've ever smelled and while it is not awful, it sure isn't very likeable. Once the base note finally appears, I will concede that Piper Nigrum has a distinct black pepper aspect but I am not crazy about the journey to get there.

If you want a superb and exciting pepper fragrance that you will never smell on another person, I'd highly recommend Ormonde Jayne's Isfarkand. For a stylish, English country house sort of pepper perfume, there is the faultlessly exquisite L'Artisan Parfumeur's Poivre Piquant.

Powerful licorice and peppermint in the opening. I felt a chill at first sniff. It was... unsettling. Hardly find this refreshing because there's spices in here that warm it up. I get BOTH of the mint and pepperiness. Very confusing,

Highly aromatic in its opening, a forceful green note featuring a clear mint comes on so strongly that its aromatic ambiance completely overwhelms the rest of the accord for a short time. I really don’t smell the anise in the accord but I think I can smell the clean sharp bitterness of the dill. A change comes in when a solid black pepper note begins replacing the green accord as the dominant note. After several minutes the pepper totally dominates and the green is reduced to providing a solid background to the pepper. The pepper note is very nice, and the green note is too, but I don’t think they necessarily go together very well. With the base notes Piper Nigrum does settle down to a comfortable green / wood dry down that is long on the coniferous notes with a bare touch of amber and myrrh. The drydown does not throw very much sillage but it lasts beautifully.

This scent very much takes getting used to, as far as I’m concerned… I like it a bit better each time I wear it but my learning curve on this one has a long road to travel. I doubt that I will ever get to the point where I will purchase a whole bottle. I can understand why some people love it, but it just doesn’t do very much for me. It’s about the only Lorenzo Villoresi fragrance that I do not admire.

I usually give Lorenzo Villoresi high marks for development--as evidenced by the orchestration of notes in Sandalo (from herbal lavendar, through tangy vetiver, through rose and sandalwood, to sweet amber) and Yerbamate (from citrus to rosewood to a plethora of greens and a bit of smoke, to delicate powder) so I expected the same from Piper Nigrum. It did not behave similarly; it started with a ton of black pepper which trailed off somewhat but still remained the dominant note from start to finish. I like black pepper, but this one had too much of a presence for me.

I agree with the previous reviews that this scent is hardly about pepper at all. It starts off smelling like sharp menthol, similar to Vicks vapor rub. Then it quickly evolves into an herbal accord right before it becomes hardly detectable on my skin. There's also something in the basenotes that smells like powdery rubber to me. It reminds me of the rubbery smell of bicycle tires (Not the outer tire shell itself, but the rubber tubing that goes inside of it).

Black pepper is one of my favorite notes. How disappointing to discover that this scent is not really about pepper at all, but more about mint, with sickly sweet drydown to boot. Not what I want to smell like.

I wish I could both understnad the appeal and find the beauty in this, but it is nothing more than bitter pepper made worse with fennel and anise, sharp and one-dimensional.

Piper Nigrum was the let down of the year for me. I was expecting a rich and exotic pepper based fragrance, but instead, what I got was a minty fragrance that was so totally out of proportion. Piper Nigrum is a mélange of strong and powerful notes that didn’t really complement or work with each other. It has that typical Villoresi style that is so stereotypically Italian.

If you really want to smell like an antique church book you will not go wrong with this stuff!!!!