The trouble with gourmands is the sugar, not the food. Perfumery walked into the kitchen and came out with the dessert trolley: caramel, praline, marshmallow. But food also smells of starch, bran, bitter roast and vegetables. Seven fragrances where those lead and the sugar comes second: a bowl of rice, a loaf, a pumpkin, cocoa, coffee, an artichoke and Nero’s dinner. None of them is sugar free, and I won’t pretend otherwise. None of them is here to please a sweet tooth either.
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The clearest statement of the idea: starch first, sugar barely (the house itself says subtly sweet). Powdery rather than steaming, and it wears very close. The house calls it a skin scent, and that’s accurate.
Bran, rosemary and smoke, so don’t come for a baguette. Wearers can’t agree which loaf this is: one says never sweeter than bread, another gets raisins, a third gets syrup.
The exception, and I admit it. Pumpkin keeps it dry at first, then it sweetens to burnt sugar as the immortelle rises. It stays because it chose a vegetable in 2010, long before savoury was a trend.
A white bean, roasted short so it stays bitter at the heart. With rum on top and tonka below, some wearers call it very sweet and others dark, so sample first.
Antoine Lie’s ristretto: licorice and wood up front, from a single-origin coffee at 6% of the formula. It does go creamy with cocoa and hazelnut, but only later.
Yes, artichoke. Bitter and green, from a Palermo house that set out to honour the vegetable, with beeswax and honey to lighten it.
Dinner at Nero’s, with Rome on fire outside. Truffle and a salty touch of caviar beside blackberry, over leather and animalic oud. Barely a gourmand, and the most savoury thing here, which is why Duchaufour’s feast closes the list.