L'Etre Aime Homme (2008)
by Divine

Recently every scent with a cardamon note gets my thumb up. I like this l'etre aime. It's smoky, nice, masculine and stylish. But Divine should work on the staying power that is miserable.

20th December, 2011.

As I saw immortelle listed in L'Etre Aime Homme I immediately had to try this composition. While I'm definitely an Immortelle freak, I've to admit that this note is quite hard to handle as its smell is so recognizable that can very easily become overwhelming and dominating. Only a few compositions so far have managed to give full splendour to this ingredient:

1) Annick Goutal Sables (A brutal aromatic blast. Extremely realistic)
2) Histoires De Parfums 1740 (burnt sugar)
3) Etat Libre D'Orange Like This (foody)

L'Etre Aime Homme brings immortelle to another level where its typical love-or-hate effect is drastically muted and the note is carefully dosed as a side ingredient to just give some sustain and body to the fragrance. What comes out is a quite successful blend of aromatic herbs and woods with citrus and lavender on top. Moderately powerful yet not exactly subtle. Not as good as L'Homme De Coeur or L'Homme Sage but overall a nice fragrance.

19th August, 2011.

I think I start virtually all my reviews with the comment "I don't know what ... smells like." Not the best advertisement for my abilities as a reviewer, but hey, I either like it or I don't. So anyway, I don't really know what immortelle is supposed to smell like. This scent opens with a hint of classic masculine - bergamot/lavendar. This is pushed into an edgy modern context by something very resinous and unfamiliar. Perhaps it is the immortelle. Within minutes I get a salty, brothy quality which I have found in a number of variations in several different scents. Sir Slarty refers to it as chicken soup. I think more of tamari soy sauce, but I think it is actually celery seed. As a Chicago guy, I am familiar with the whole celery salt on your hot dogs thing and sure enough, the drydown has that celery salt element. This saltiness is persistent throughout the life of the scent and unltimately, for me is its undoing. Just not a pretty scent. However, as this stuff dries down, the nice amber, wood and patchouly qualities recognizable from L'homme Sage appear and provide some elegance. The incense of L'homme sage is not here though, and the celery vibe is not a good replacement. Likeable, definitely a try before you buy. If you don't like L'homme Sage, you probably would be wasting your time with this.

17th April, 2011.

I am so tempted to praise L’être Aimé simply because it presents to me a wearable, attractive immortal note – that doesn’t happen often to this nose – I actually enjoy the immortal accord in L’être Aimé. It is definitely but delicately aromatic without any kind of that aggressive olfactory assault (I’m talking to you, Sables and Eau Noire). As usual with a strong wood / herbal opening, I can’t identify any of the other opening notes besides the wood / herb, but those other notes do help give body to an excellent opening dominated by immortal. The immortal continues for an impressive length of time while becoming more and more skin-scent like. The drydown is a soft, undistinguished wood accord with an anemic sandalwood and later, an unclear synthetic cedar being predominant to my nose.

The way it performs on my skin, L’être Aimé is not very complex but I also find its simplicity inviting and interesting. I truly enjoy the use of Immortal in this fragrance and am putting it at the bottom of a long list of possible purchase… I don’t think it quite deserves a thumbs up, but, personally, I’ll keep it in the “Active” file and give it another consideration a month or two from now.

7th December, 2010.

The two previous men’s scents from Divine, L’Homme Sage and L’Homme de Coeur, both elicited love at first sniff from me, but it’s taken me much longer to come to grips with L’Etre Aime Homme. I wrote a review of L’Etre Aime Homme last year, when it was first released, but since it had not yet been listed in the Basenotes Directory I set the review aside…and apparently misplaced it.

Wearing L’Etre Aime Homme again sparks no memory of that previous review, which may indicate just how little an impression the scent made upon me. L’Etre Aime Homme strikes me as the most subdued and enigmatic of the trio, and that’s quite a feat, since it’s composed around immortelle, which is notorious as one of the most intractable and overbearing notes in perfumery. It seems to me that immortelle is difficult to dose. Use it in any quantity, and it tends to dominate a composition at the expense of all other ingredients. (Annick Goutal’s love-it-or-leave-it immortelle foghorn Sables is a case in point.) Without carefully chosen and proportioned savory accents immortelle can also become syrupy sweet and awkwardly “foody.” So much so at times as to suggest artificial “maple” food flavoring. Divine’s perfumer Yann Vasnier controls immortelle’s bullying tendencies by using it in moderation, and avoids the maple syrup trap by setting it in a decidedly inedible woody context.

Only the most fleeting of bergamot and aromatic top notes usher in L’Etre Ame Homme’s sweet woody heart, which sustains an unvaried pulse for several hours. The dark woods and immortelle are accompanied by sweet culinary spices and the barest hint of dry patchouli, which together lend the scent a deep, cozy warmth. Warmth enough that I’d find L’Etre Aime Homme oppressive in the summer heat, even though it’s not an overly potent scent. L’Etre Aime Homme is odd in offering sillage disproportionate to its modest potency, so while it never comes across as loud, it does linger in the air, such that you’ll catch hints of it if you retrace your steps within a room.

After all this, L’Etre Aime Homme’s drydown is a disappointment, consisting as it does mostly of a “sandalwood” that smells to me much more like a skimpy, hollow, dusty cedar of no particular character. This limp exit leaves me wondering exactly what to make of L’Etre Aime Homme. On the plus side, it is remarkably deft in its use of immortelle, and gracefully sidesteps the crude bombast into which that ingredient can so easily drift. The deficits are a certain perplexing want of character and that dull, flimsy drydown. The balance leaves me still ambivalent. L’Etre Aime Homme is a pleasant scent and for the most part an accomplished composition, but after the delightful L’Homme Sage and L’Homme de Coeur I wanted more.

13rd December, 2009.

Spices/herbs and foody and felt like I spilt my mother's chicken soup on myself. Other than the top notes, nothing else is interesting about this. Typical woody amber found in most designer scents. Don't like it.

10th June, 2009.