Zadig & Voltaire
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Grapefruit and lemon assault with lemony-fresh clarity, arriving like cold water on waking. The citrus is sharp rather than juicy, almost bitter in its precision, with no immediate sweetness to soften the blow.
The metallic notes surface unexpectedly, lending an almost industrial shimmer to the orange blossom—a strange, glittering floral that feels simultaneously ethereal and austere. The spice accord swells here, adding warmth that contradicts the cool metallic shimmer.
Amberwood and palo santo establish their warm, resinous presence as the citrus evaporates entirely. What remains is woody and grounded, with that metallic thread still discernible beneath—a whisper of the fragrance's earlier strangeness persisting on skin.
This Is Really Him! announces itself as a study in controlled contradiction—a fragrance that wants to feel both austere and sensual, mechanical and organic. Nathalie Lorson has crafted something defiantly modern: the grapefruit and lemon opening doesn't coddle you with warmth but rather cuts through with the sort of bright precision you'd find in a minimalist art installation. But there's a peculiar twist waiting in the heart. Those metallic notes—rare enough in contemporary fragrances—don't manifest as cheap ozonic shimmer; instead, they interact with orange blossom in a way that feels almost skin-metallic, as if you've brushed against something precious and cool. The orange blossom doesn't sweeten the composition so much as it lends a spectral, almost soapy luminosity to the metals' sharp edges.
The woody base of amberwood and palo santo grounds everything in warm, resinous earth, but by then the metallic thread has already wound itself through the composition's DNA. This isn't comfort-scent territory. This is for the wearer who respects architectural perfumery—someone drawn to fragrances that challenge rather than flatter. It suits those who appreciate their citrus with a side of intellectual provocation, who don't mind a fragrance that withers slightly awkwardly in the heart before recalibrating in the dry down. Gender feels genuinely immaterial here; the composition has enough spice and woody density to resist gendering conventions entirely.
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3.8/5 (116)