Purple Accento

Purple Accento is Christian Carbonnel's exercise in controlled opulence—a fragrance that takes the familiar fruity-floral template and injects it with enough oud and orris to make it interesting. The opening salvo of pineapple isn't the tired tropical cliché; instead, it's sharpened by hyacinth's green, almost metallic edge and bergamot's petitgrain-like bitterness, creating a brightness that verges on acidic. As the composition unfolds, loganberry brings a peculiar jammy tartness that sits oddly—thrillingly, even—against pink pepper's fizzing spice and jasmine's indolic richness. The orris root here is crucial, lending a powdery, root-vegetable earthiness that prevents the fruit from tipping into Fanta territory.

What's unexpected is how the base refuses to play nice. The oud isn't scrubbed clean; there's a faint animalic funk beneath the sandalwood's creamy wood and vanilla's custard-like sweetness. Amber adds warmth without turning the whole affair into a cloying mess, whilst musk provides a skin-like intimacy that draws everything together. This is a fragrance for someone who wants to smell expensive without shouting about it—the sort of person who wears cashmere to the cinema. It works equally well on skin warmed by summer sun or against the chill of an autumn evening, though it's perhaps too unabashedly pretty for the depths of winter. There's a studied ease to Purple Accento, a sense that Carbonnel knew exactly how far he could push the sweetness before it collapsed under its own weight. He stops just short, and that restraint makes all the difference.