Poivre Piquant (2002)
by L'Artisan Parfumeur

Poivre piquant is actually very sweet, with a Tobacco Vanille style of honey. Quite different for a gourmand.

The woody/pepper notes that occasionally waft into your nose are quite nice during the first 2-3 hours of projection. It's when you go to sniff it up close that you get the licorice and other unpleasant smells. I only advise smelling this from a distance. Leans feminine to me but not heavily, still unisex.

The overall effect is similar to other pepper/woody scents but that licorice note makes it unique. Feels more dressed up than casual.

Lasts 5-6 hours.

Straight away - spicy honey, then woodiness and only in last stage milky-creamy pepper - thats how Poivre Piquant opens and develops on my skin. I personally wouldn't call this fragrance sweet-peppery one, as that type to me is Azzaro Visit, but I would call it woody-honeyed-licorice one,- sugar with honey and licorice mix is able to digest about a kilogramm of black pepper, so you will not sneeze from this frag for sure, but its a very relaxing, easy to wear one, not a schizophrenic type of smell. Love from me. Yet I would prefer more staying power.

Genre: Woody Oriental

This is a more lithe, elegant, and transparent composition than the other contemporary black pepper-centered oriental I’m acquainted with, Lorenzo Villoresi’s Piper Nigrum. In this regard its closer to their mutual predecessor, Caron’s lovely peppered incense and rose Parfum Sacré. Very close, in fact. Poivre Piquant is quieter, drier, and woodier, with far less emphasis on rose, but Perfum Sacré’s fundamental architecture is legible, though in a stripped down and attenuated form. As a result, the black pepper note stands out more clearly, and the overall impression is much sharper, and comparatively even stark or harsh. In other words, more “modern.”

Poivre Piquant is less dense than either Piper Nigrum or Parfum Sacré, and it does not share the former’s complex, extended, and surprising development, hewing instead to a relatively linear course before fading into a powdery vanilla, woods, and incense skin scent. This it does over the course of just a couple of hours, with limited sillage and modest strength. If you like the idea of a peppery woody oriental, but crave more understatement than you’d get from some of the alternatives, Poivre Piquant might be your pepper. To me it seems a little bit too shy, and somehow incomplete next to its closest rivals.

There is a saffron note, in poivre piquant, that makes it so dear to me. It is the note of Christmas and that's why I love to wear it in winter. I associate it to the colour white and I like the fact that the colour chosen for its box is a very light cream.