Séville à l'Aube
L'Artisan Parfumeur (2012)

Full throated orange blossom with melted beeswax and petitgrain dry towards dimmer florals and a note of ozone. It's a pretty good orange blossom fragrance with the added notes giving it some depth, but I was hoping for more incensey churchiness. This is primarily a soft warm white floral. Nicely succulent florals, though.

If you’ve read The Perfume Lover, you’ll know it’s the story of Séville à l’Aube: the night Denyse Beaulieu spent with a young man below the orange trees by the cathedral, where a high mass was about to happen.
And if you know Avignon, the ground breaking incense by Bertrand Duchaufour, it's easy to see what happened : the incense, the wooden benches and the cold stones of Avignon were overlaid by a thick honeyed beeswax and orange blossom - the flower that hides sex behind its tiny skirts, as Beaulieu puts it.
Between the ascetic and the carnivalesque, it's a bit of a mish-mash.

Seville a l'Aube takes me to a place I've never been before.

The opening is heady, green, honeyed, and waxy, spellbinding to my nose. There is a languorous beauty that evokes the advent of summertime, as the temperatures rise, and all the fragrances of the trees, the blossoms, stir up a balm in the air. Filtered sun radiates through petitgrain leaves, baking them in the late May air while the distinct herbal, unctuous presence of olive blossoms is thick and pendulous.

While the development of Seville a l'Aube is arguably linear, suggestions of benzoin and olibanum come to the fore after an hour, the beeswax settles, and overall the experience becomes rounder, softer, and the orange blossom takes center stage, beaming and sweet, with perhaps the benzoin contributing to this shift.

The wanderlust in me yearns for more when wearing this beautiful fragrance. There is so much more to experience, so many travels that lie ahead, and too much time passing me by.

What I have is the older bottle with the orange label.

Smells like a new book
Of flowers, incense, people
And an old story.

Review is too short
Please go back and add some more
Which Red gladly did!

A beautiful rich orange blossom, with a deep amber-y warmth. Orange blossom doesn't get any better than this. This perfume is like drinking in a deep, fiery-orange sunset - ‘Seville at Dusk' would have been a more appropriate name than ‘Seville at Dawn'.

One of l'Artisan's best scents. A shame it's no longer available.

I have had the pleasure of wandering through old Seville late at night.

Duchaufour's tribute to the majestic and peculiar city captures its spiritual essence. Duchaufour builds an artful church-y incense and beeswax composition and then uses sensual and lively floral notes to undercut its seriousness, blending the imminent and the transcendent.