Subversif Eau de Parfum Gift Set

Fig is the most interesting material in Brecourt Subversif Eau de Parfum Gift Set, and it is used in its green, milky form rather than as a sweet fruit.

It opens alongside blackcurrant and bergamot, the blackcurrant tart and faintly green, the bergamot bright, and the fig underneath them both bringing that distinctive smell of sap, leaf and unripe fruit at once. It is a cool and slightly odd opening, and it sets up a scent that gets steadily darker rather than steadily sweeter, which is the opposite of what most bottles do.

The heart is where the name starts to make sense. Leather is dry and smoky, cinnamon hot, vetiver rooty and bitter, and heliotrope sits in the middle of them adding a powdery almond softness that should not work against the leather but does, giving the composition a genuine tension between comfort and edge. That tension is sustained for an hour or more before the base settles in.

Tobacco, patchouli and ambergris make that base. Tobacco is sweet and leafy, patchouli earthy, and ambergris adds a warm, salty, skin like quality that makes the finish feel personal rather than performed. It lasts well, stays close after the first hour, and leaves something behind on a scarf. Emilie Bouge composed it.

Given as a gift this suits a recipient who wears fragrance deliberately and would be bored by anything merely pleasant. It reads unisex, it is a cold weather scent, and it is better after dark than in daylight, when the fig can read sharper than intended. Brecourt keeps a short niche range out of France, and the perfumer responsible for it is Emilie Bouge, who was born in the hills near Grasse.