Cendre Blanche
Vetiver, cade, guaiac
- Composed by
- Théo Vasseur
- Family
- Woody
- Formula written
- 2021
- From
- €78.00
Cendre Blanche
Vetiver, cade, guaiac
How it was built
Smoke is easy to make and difficult to make bearable. Most smoky fragrances reach for birch tar and stop there, which is why so many of them smell like a new pair of boots and nothing else.
Cendre Blanche uses birch tar at under a tenth of the level you would expect, and asks Haitian vetiver to do the structural work instead. Vetiver from Haiti is rooty and slightly smoked already; distilled long, it gives grapefruit-rind bitterness at the top and a dry earth floor at the bottom, and the cade sits between them as the actual burnt note.
The white in the name is ash rather than florals. There is no flower anywhere in the formula.
How it wears
Four properties, read on skin over a full day rather than on a blotter. They describe behaviour, not preference.
Sillage
An arm's length
Longevity
Into the next day
Temperature
Neither
Density
Layered
These are the atelier’s own readings, taken on skin rather than on a blotter, and they describe how the fragrance behaves rather than how much anyone liked it.
Head, heart and base
The materials that determine each stage, in the order they own it. The bars are compositional weight within a tier, not a percentage of the formula; the formula itself is not published.
Head
The most volatile materials. They are what you smell as the alcohol flashes off, and they are gone inside twenty minutes.
Juniper berryJuniperus communis
GrapefruitCitrus paradisi
Angelica rootAngelica archangelica
Heart
The body of the composition. It emerges as the head clears and holds for two to four hours; this is the fragrance as it is meant to be recognised.
Vetiver, HaitiChrysopogon zizanioides
CadeJuniperus oxycedrus
CypriolCyperus scariosus
Base
The least volatile materials, and the ones that fix the rest in place. What is left on skin at the end of the day, and on cloth for days after.
Patchouli coeurPogostemon cablin
GuaiacwoodBulnesia sarmientoi
Birch tar, rectifiedBetula pendula
Materials and provenance
Where the principal materials come from and how they are won from the plant. Every lot behind a given bottle is recorded against its flacon code.
VetiverChrysopogon zizanioides
Les Cayes, Haiti
Roots cured six weeks, steam distilled twenty hours
Haitian vetiver is cut by hand on slopes no machine can hold. The long distillation is what pulls the smoked, slightly nutty end of the material out of the roots.
GuaiacwoodBulnesia sarmientoi
Gran Chaco, Paraguay
Steam distillation of heartwood chips
The oil is solid at room temperature and has to be warmed to be weighed. It smells of rose and tar at once, which is why it can carry a smoke accord without hardening it.
Size and price
Each size is filled from the same batch. The ten millilitre format is not a sample; it is the same juice in a smaller flacon.
€78.00
10 ml eau de parfum · reference NOC-CDB-010
Bottles are filled to order from the current batch and dispatched within five working days. Fragrance cannot be returned once the seal is broken; an unopened flacon may be returned within fourteen days.