Cadjméré 18
Parfumerie Generale (2007)

Syrupy at the top with vanilla & ambrette seed, nearly stomping out the tangerine and green notes -- Nearly. The latter notes are here but, I have to wait until the sweetness settles to truly enjoy them. Cozy and warm is a good way to describe this frag so far. Creamy. A toasted something. A liquid sugar, snort-fest. Cadjmere is pretty much for me, a vanilla-laced, amber-y wood bomb. I got a tiny hint of cypress - not much.

Still, I'll enjoy my decant to the end as I'm a 'fume-whore for amber and vanilla. I would've liked to smell more of the top notes and cypress but it's all good.

A floaty perfume, a cardamom-bamboo concoction that majors on creaminess, a kind of kulfi crossed with wood dust. Comforting? For sure, especially with the big glug of milky vanilla at its tail end. But exciting? Not sure. There's a good accord of zingy spice and greenish woods under all that flattening creaminess and had that been lifted out a bit more I might have been cheerleading for this one, instead of putting it away with note to self of ‘pleasant but a bit of a snooze'.

I first smell lavender. Then orange and sandal. This dissipates into a spicy and powdery vanilla.
I love it. Well done. I just wish the citrus would stay longer.
Both sillage and longevity are good, although not exceptional.

This opens with creamy woods, citrus peel & a faintly camphoraceous note. The much-mentioned toasted coconut is there, but I have to sniff for it. It's a slightly odd mix, but soon it settles into a lightly spiced, fuzzy sandalwood, with a deep, chocolatey vanilla running through it. It's not overly sweet, though, more like salted caramel than cupcakes. At this stage I totally get the comparisons to Dior Addict. There's something vaguely animalic in there as well, & twenty minutes in it's a luscious comfort scent. After an hour or so, some powderiness creeps in, & at the two-hour mark it's all soft, powdery woods, still with that faint camphoraceousness. From here it becomes a skin scent, & lasts around nine hours before fading.
I've really enjoyed using my sample as a comfort scent on cold days, & as an added bonus, my partner likes it too. I'd prefer it to project for much longer, but this could well end up on my buy list.

This year, we spent our summer holidays in Copenhagen. And apart from serious wardrobe envy that had me fighting the urge to tackle every Danish woman to the ground and steal her clothes (and bicycle), I also discovered the Danish art of hygge.

Pronounced “heuuurgah”, as if trying to dislodge a hairball from one's throat, hygge translates loosely to “coziness,” a concept that the Danes take very seriously indeed. This involves snuggling under cashmere blankets, lighting candles, drinking hot chocolate around a blazing fire, lounging around on sheepskin rugs, and, well, resting your face against the furry belly of a sleeping kitten. Basically, anything that gives you comfort and ease. The best explanation I found was in an article that defined it as “the absence of anything annoying or emotionally overwhelming; taking pleasure from the presence of gentle, soothing things.”

Well, hell, sign me up! I'm in serious need of a hygge.

As it turns out, hygge (for me) turns out to be walking with my family in a nearby pine forest called The Raven, a nature reserve that backs onto Curracloe beach. Used for the D-Day landing scenes at the start of Saving Private Ryan and more recently, Brooklyn, this beach and its adjoining forest is the kind of place you go when you need to filter out all the "annoying or emotionally overwhelming" things in your life. So, last Sunday when I went there, I decided to "up the hygge" and go with a fragrance that is all about cozy, lived-in comfort.

I chose Cadjmere. Cadjmere is a perfect embodiment of hygge. Two words: creamy pine! Actually, it calls to mind that brilliant phrase coined by the ladies over at Now Smell This, namely “wood pudding”, which is basically any scent that captures the same feeling of comfort you get when you slip into your pajamas at the end of a long day.

While Cadjmere definitely qualifies as sweet and creamy, what comes through for me in the first half is mainly green, aromatic woods with only a faint undertone of milkiness. The cypress and rosewood notes are incredibly natural and bright-smelling, and I'm reminded once again that Pierre Guillaume is the master of all things woods-related.

It opens with a combination of aromatic cypress wood, rosewood, and mandarin orange that smells briefly like orange-scented milk chocolate before smoothing out into a milky pine-like smell. It evokes the feeling of being in deep forest, the aroma of raw wood bleeding milky sap into the air, and crushed pine needles underfoot.

After a while, Cadjmere loses its bright, spiky greenness and becomes fuzzier, as if someone reached into a picture and smudged out all the hard lines with their thumb. Finally, in the base, a sweet, musky sandalwood expands to fill the air pockets left by the sharp, aromatic woods, becoming ever sweeter and creamier with the addition of vanilla.

There is something very evocative, very eighties about the sandalwood accord here, reminding me of the trail of heavy, coconutty sandalwood perfumes on the sweaters of friends as we prepared to go out to a disco. I don't know whether it's a memory of a specific perfume or simply a collection of different smell memories - hairspray, cheap perfume, lipstick, teenage girl musk, lava lamps, and so on. But I kind of like it, although I can see why some might find it too sweet and perfumey.

Cadjmere might not be as arresting or as dramatic as Coze, as sensual as L'Ombre Fauve, or as tasty as Aomassai, but it lands right in the hygge-seeking part of my soul and sticks. I might not love it forever, but it's just what I need right now, as I pull on my hiking boots to take the kids out blackberry-picking in The Raven. It's a cashmere sweater between washes, a light female musk and three-day old sandalwood perfume clinging to its fibers, wafting up to greet you like an old friend. Totally hygge, I'm telling you.

Genre: Woody Oriental

Notes (from Luckyscent): myrtle branch, sap, red tangerine, rosewood, Kenyan cypress resin, coconut milk, sandalwood bark, ambrette seed, vanilla.

Let me confess from the beginning that Cadjmere is not the kind of fragrance that I normally enjoy. It starts out as a kind of woody gourmand scent, with notes of dry toasted coconut and powder over vanilla and a sweet floral note that may be the listed rosewood. The name is just right. This scent is warm, velvety smooth, and somehow almost "stuffy," as if my nose were buried in a sweater.

The coconut, vanilla, and rosewood play out in a linear manner through Cadjmere's heart. They are accented by a dash of something camphoraceous that causes an occasional metallic glint amidst all of the velour. Unfortunately, I don't think that it's quite enough to keep Cadjmere from feeling somewhat ponderous. I also find the toasted coconut note to be significantly out of balance, and it becomes tiresome to me after an hour or so.

I'm surprised to find the camphoraceous note holding on until late in the development, when it lends some much-needed lift to what strikes me otherwise as a relatively flat and conventional sandalwood and vanilla drydown. Cadjmere will no doubt appeal to lovers of sweet gourmand fragrances, but it leaves me smelling too much like a macaroon.