Absolus Allegoria Tabac Sahara Eau de Parfum 75ml

Tobacco is the material that divides people, and Guerlain Absolus Allegoria Tabac Sahara Eau de Parfum 75ml puts it at the centre and then does something unexpected with it.

Raspberry opens the fragrance, tart and slightly jammy, and for the first few minutes it is the loudest thing in the bottle. Pairing a bright red fruit with tobacco is a risk, because the two can read as a mistake, and what saves it here is that the raspberry is kept dry rather than syrupy.

Tobacco then takes the middle, and it is the sweet, cured, cigar box reading of the material, honeyed and faintly hay like rather than ashy. Rose sits beside it, deep and a little jammy, picking up where the raspberry left off and smoothing the handover. The two of them together are what make this wearable rather than a novelty, and they are the reason the fragrance does not smell like an ashtray at any point.

The base is pure comfort. Amber gives resinous warmth, vanilla sweetens without tipping into dessert, and ambergris adds the salty, mineral quality that makes the drydown feel polished and stops the sweetness from becoming heavy. It is a soft, warm, slightly smoky finish, and it is the part of the fragrance you will still be aware of at the end of a long evening. Expect nine or ten hours with strong projection early on. It reads unisex with a lean towards masculine wear, it is unmistakably a cold weather fragrance, and 75ml is a sensible size for something this rich.

Guerlain opened in Paris in 1828 and remains a French house, owned today by LVMH, and generations of its own perfumers have produced work including Jicky in 1889, the first fragrance to put synthetic and natural materials in the same formula.