Yves Saint Laurent
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The pink pepper detonates first, sharp and almost peppery-green, whilst bergamot tries to lighten the mood with its characteristic citric sweetness. Within moments, frankincense smoke rolls in like a heavy curtain, suffocating the brightness and establishing that this fragrance has no interest in being immediately likeable.
The resinous heart reveals itself as genuinely beautiful—benzoin and styrax create a warm, amber-tinged cocoon that's almost gourmand in its sweetness, yet the frankincense refuses to release its grip, keeping everything tethered to something ancient and ceremonial. Cistus absolute emerges here too, adding a subtle leathery, slightly dusty quality that prevents the composition from becoming cloying.
The base settles into a soft, skin-like embrace where musk becomes the primary player, amplifying the residual warmth of the resins. What remains is intimate and understated—a whisper of leather, benzoin's honeyed warmth, and the faintest ghost of frankincense smoke, increasingly abstract and personal on the skin.
Caftan is a fragrance that trades conventional beauty for something far more intriguing: a smoky, resinous meditation on incense and skin. Calice Becker has constructed something deliberately austere here, where pink pepper's bite immediately collides with bergamot's brightness, only to be swallowed by frankincense's ecclesiastical smoke within moments. This is not a comfortable opening—it's confrontational, almost medicinal.
What makes Caftan genuinely arresting is how the base notes transform this into something almost edible. Benzoin and styrax, those warm, vanillic resins, arrive like melted amber honey poured over smouldering wood, whilst cistus absolute—that precious, leathery absolute—grounds everything with an earthy, slightly animalic quality. The musk isn't the synthetic sugar-bomb of mass-market fragrances; here it functions as a second skin, amplifying the resinous warmth rather than diluting it.
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3.9/5 (107)