I bought this blind last December partially because I trust Marc-Antoine Corticchiato as much as my own mother, partially because I’d heard the comparisons to my beloved but by now unobtanium Vanille (by Mona di Orio), and partially because I was about to move to Iran, one of the driest countries in the world, and felt that I’d find the scent of booze comforting and nostalgic. I regret everything.
Madagascar Le Baume Vanille reminds me of Havana Vanille by L’Artisan Parfumeur, which promised me a booze-soaked bread pudding and delivered an experience akin to inhaling the fumes of a sour rag soaked with whiskey-flavoured E numbers. But worse, in Madagascar Le Baume Vanille, there is a strong and unpleasant aroma of melting plastic, like having left a plastic spoon on a gas burner or a power surge burning through the wiring behind a computer server.
This accord persists like a malign spirit, inducing a mild sense of unease in me. Something about it just smells wrong. It could be black pepper or toasted tobacco leaf or burnt banana peel, I don’t know, but it doesn’t present as organic to my nose, which is what makes it disturbing. It kind of smells like the metallic, sour-rich smell of booze sweat seeping through your pores the morning after a night of heavy drinking. Turns out that’s not something I miss much in Iran. Nothing cute about the scent of your liver working overtime.
Eventually it dries down to a familiar chord used in perfumes that try to capture the woody-spicy-pungent tones of a vanilla pod, by which I mean that raisin-tobacco-cacao axis, which smells really good in and of itself, because how could it not, yet is nothing new under the sun, especially if you own stuff like Vanille Havane (by Les Indemodables), Écrin Fumée (Serge Lutens) or Tobacco Vanille (Tom Ford) and so on and so forth. If there is a mirage of vanilla pod being summoned here, it’s lost on me and my peasant nose. So, not only did I buy a perfume that doesn’t fill a gap in my collection, but I also bought one whose burning latex topnotes make it a trial to wear in the first hour or two. Absolute genius, Claire.
Cover Image: Photo by Compagnons on Unsplash