Eau de Cashmere
Guerlain (2014)

It's hard to comment on what you can barely smell, but this odour, like sweet-musky paper grains, is somewhere between air care, primitive washing powder and something Demeter would do (at a fraction of the price).

It's what could be left over after White Linen went through a thousand hot washes; a pale cottony fine fragrance.

But then again, calling this Fine Fragrance is stretching it somewhat. It's more of a sweet nothing, a style that isn't without merit, but this sort of thing is better as a candle.

Eau de Cashmere isn't bad, but it's basic, and ephemeral; you have to keep spraying every half an hour to keep it going. So, even though it's quite nice - when you can actually smell it - it doesn't deserve a positive rating.

Simply fantastic! I get so many different notes that it becomes impossible to categorize as this or that....
Really does smell like cashmere feels- soft and comforting. I contacted Guerlain to ask for more products based on this scent-- I would buy them all.

Really nice, classy Eau from Guerlain!

Eau de Cashmere, a unisex fragrance, leads with a citrus salvo of mandarin orange and bergamot that flows into the almond-vanilla wonder contained within heliotrope blossom, blended nicely with the strong presence of iris plus bright musk. Lavender floats evenly in this mix, with a touch of cedar starchiness and earthy mossy vetiver.

This all creates a rich, cashmeran-like experience which I really am drawn to! Smooth, caressing fragrance that I enjoy every second of. Big thumbs up for this!!

So, Guerlain is selling this is as an add-on perfume to be layered with its L'Art et la Matiere collection. That's really saying something. The Matiere collection started off brilliantly as an experiment in combining featured notes with the legendary Guerlinade base (benzoin in Bois D'Armenie, for example) and gave us some of this century's best Guerlains. Unfortunately, at some point it lost the point and dropped the Guerlinade in favor of cheap marshmallowy vanilla.

So, basically, Eau de Cashmere is all the ingredients you need to turn a cheap, common vanilla into a modernized Guerlinade. There's honey and rum and that fusion you get when chamomile and cedar combine to smell like pipe tobacco. There's a quiet hum of iris and moss, along with ambrox and hints of benzoin amber, as well as a pinch of powder on top and some of Guerlain's signature candied cherry.

It's fascinating as a marketing strategy, almost a full-on admission to their most loyal fans that they've put out a lot of cheap marshmallow crap lately.

But all that aside, does it work as a stand-alone perfume? Yes, definitely. Pipe tobacco and rum with hints of fruit and amber and a touch of complex greens. It's gorgeous. Imagine Spiriteuese Double Vanilla with most of the vanilla removed, leaving it lighter for warmer weather, but with a complex warmth nonetheless. There's a chemical component hovering as well, a combination of the powder and some sort of brightening chemical, which I would usually dislike, but which adds a weird sort of freshness that counterbalances the richness. Thumbs up - I'm considering a full bottle...