Foreste di Seta Eau de Parfum 100ml

Walnut is a rare thing to find in a fragrance, and it is the reason to look twice at Salvatore Ferragamo Foreste di Seta Eau de Parfum 100ml.

Three materials, which makes this a short composition by any standard. Clary sage opens it, herbal and dusty and faintly sweet, with the dry quality that makes sage feel serious rather than fresh. Walnut is the middle, and it smells exactly as it should: oily, slightly bitter, a little sweet, closer to the shell and the skin of the nut than to anything baked with it. Madagascar vetiver closes it, rooty and dry with a faint smokiness, and it is the material that gives the whole thing its length.

There is no evolution to wait for. What arrives in the first ten minutes is what you wear all day, which makes it a good fragrance to test properly before buying and an easy one to live with afterwards. Short compositions are often the most wearable things a house makes, because there is nothing in them to go wrong by the afternoon. At eau de parfum strength the concentration shows up as persistence rather than volume. It stays within arm's reach for six or seven hours, which suits the register: this is a dry, quiet, slightly austere scent rather than one that announces anything.

The perfumers were Aliénor Massenet and Emilie Bevierre-Coppermann, in 2023. It reads unisex, works in cool weather and in daylight, and suits an office particularly well, where quiet fragrances earn their keep. The company has its roots in a Florence shoemaking business begun in 1927 and moved into the Palazzo Spini Feroni in 1938, while fragrance only became part of it at the end of the nineties.