Salvador Dali
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The first fifteen minutes deliver a surprisingly forceful burst of mandarin and pineapple, with the plum adding a jammy depth that prevents it from reading as purely citric. There's an immediate sweetness here, almost sherbet-like, but the lemon keeps things from tumbling into full confectionery territory. It's brash, bright, and unapologetically fruity—if you're not prepared for that opening salvo, you might think you've picked up something from the Body Shop circa 1995.
As the fruits begin their retreat, the vanilla and iris combination takes centre stage, creating this odd, compelling contrast between creamy sweetness and cool, almost rubbery floralcy. The lily of the valley adds a clean, soapy facet that makes the rose feel more abstract than romantic, whilst the iris root brings an earthy, lipstick-like quality that grounds all that exuberance. It's here that Laguna reveals itself as genuinely unisex—neither overtly feminine nor masculine, just persistently soft and strangely comforting.
What remains is a quiet hum of sandalwood and musk, with just enough amber to add warmth without weight. The vanilla never quite disappears, instead forming a gauzy backdrop against which the wood notes play out their gentle denouement. It sits close to the skin, smelling like clean laundry left in a room where someone once burned sandalwood incense—pleasant, undemanding, and thoroughly polite.
Salvador Dali's Laguna is a surrealist's take on a fruit salad left on a Mediterranean balcony, where the expected freshness keeps pivoting into something unexpectedly plush and skin-like. Mark Buxton has crafted something genuinely peculiar here—a fragrance that opens with the sunny conviction of citrus and tropical fruit, then promptly forgets what it was doing and wanders into a vanilla-hazed floral garden. The Calabrian mandarin and pineapple create an immediate effect that's almost tactile, like sticky fingers after peeling an orange in the sun, but just as you're settling into that freshness, a creamy triumvirate of Réunion vanilla, iris, and muguet materialises beneath it all. This is where Laguna becomes interesting: the iris lends a cool, almost powdery mineralness that stops the vanilla from becoming outright gourmand, whilst the lily of the valley adds a soapy, green transparency that keeps the fruits from cloying. The listed aquatic accord manifests not as marine ozone but as that peculiar wateriness you find in certain white florals—a wet petal quality. By the time the sandalwood and amber arrive, they've got a lot of competing personalities to reconcile, and they do so with a soft, musky warmth that smells distinctly early Nineties. This is for someone who wants their fruit scents complicated, their florals friendly, and their musks unabashedly soft. Wear it when you're feeling nostalgic for an era when perfumery hadn't yet decided that fruity and sophisticated were mutually exclusive concepts.
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3.5/5 (147)