Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle
Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle
517 votes
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
That initial hit is pure liquid fruit—raspberry and lychee so ripe they're almost fermenting, sharpened by red currant's tart edge and the metallic, honeyed bite of saffron. It's jammy and intense, like breaking into an overripe berry with juice staining your fingers, but there's an underlying strangeness, a hint of something smokier lurking beneath the sweetness.
The frankincense rises like incense smoke through a beaded curtain, its resinous bitterness cutting through the fruit and creating an intriguing sweet-smoke dichotomy. Turkish rose emerges in full, concentrated and honeyed, its petals seeming to absorb both the berry stain and the ecclesiastical smoke, creating something that feels simultaneously sacred and sensual.
What remains is a soft, animalic murmur of leather and oud, the fruit now a distant memory like the ghost of jam on morning toast. The leather has that supple, worn quality of an old jacket, whilst the oud adds earthy depth without aggression, and the whole composition settles into skin with amber warmth and a lingering whisper of roses pressed into suede.
The Moon is Julien Rasquinet's fever dream of opulence, where jammy fruits meet resinous incense in an unlikely tryst that shouldn't work but absolutely does. The opening salvo of raspberry and lychee reads less like a fruit basket and more like expensive berry preserves macerated in rose water—syrupy, deep, and tinged with the metallic brightness of saffron that keeps it from tipping into gourmand territory. This isn't polite fruitiness; it's the kind of lush, almost fermented ripeness that borders on decay in the most beguiling way.
What makes The Moon compelling is how that fruit-forward opening crashes headlong into the austere duo of frankincense and Turkish rose. The incense adds a smoky, resinous backbone that transforms those berries from summery to something far more nocturnal and liturgical. The rose here isn't dewy or garden-fresh—it's the concentrated, honeyed depth of rose absolute, threaded through with the waxy, slightly green quality of petals pressed in an old book. Then comes the leather and oud in the base, not screaming but insinuating themselves like shadows lengthening at dusk. The leather has a soft, broken-in quality rather than the sharp bite of new hide, whilst the oud remains surprisingly restrained, adding earthy darkness without dominating.
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3.8/5 (124)