Aedes de Venustas (new)
Aedes de Venustas (2012)

Opens with spicy, tart fruit, vegetal greenery, and a delicate transparency. Unfortunately, it turned into a sour-bitter grapefruit and vetiver brew that so many masculine fragrances produce. It had great longevity though, I was catching wafts of vetiver into the next morning. Sillage was moderate.
I wanted to love this, but I don't. The green, sharp fruity vegetable garden scent didn't stay. I appreciate the artistry and creativity in the design of the fragrance. It simply didn't work for me.

I wouldn't have predicted a rhubarb frankincense would be a delight but it is. In its homes of origin frankincense has a strong association with clean clothes. The tart rhubarb shimmers over that vision of fresh-pressed, blue-embroidered white linen as on a spring morning's breakfast bowl.

I wanted to love this one--all the notes sounded good. I can do tomato leaf, and rhubarb, and berries. But. On my skin this morphed almost immediately into a bitter grapefruit. And it wasn't a good sort of grapefruit either. The bitterness was overwhelming. Eventually it dried down into "marine" notes, which might have been slightly vetiver-y. This was hideous on me, an absolute scrubber. I will be passing my decant along to someone else.

Boating on the River Epte by Claude Monet 1890

Light, green, and fruity, but a delicate, watery fruit (starfruit?). A high, tart, almost pine-y smell in the background of opening. A touch of ginger in there somewhere. A hint of very light musk underneath (vetiver?). Vetiver comes more to the front during drydown - very green, garden-y smell (tomato leaves?) A nice summer fragrance.

It's very hard for me to fully disconnect this perfume from others, so I'm not sure I can be 100% impartial. First off, the original Aedes perfume, the one by L'Artisan, is one of my favorite scents of all time, an almost impossibly complex but constantly wearable mix of smoky incense and gourmand elements. Next to that, the new Aedes is just simple. The rhubarb note is fantastic, but it just sort of sits on some vaguely perfumey soap with a hint of wood underneath.

I also can't help but compare this to CDG's Rhubarb, which was also made by Duchoufour. The CDG is a more insistent fruit note surrounded by rice milk and office smells that I find almost impossibly compelling but that seems quite widely disliked for its weirdness. Well, I suppose the point could be made that the new Aedes is a rhubarb for everyone who hated the CDG for being so weird and compelling, because this Aedes is neither of those, instead content to be fruity soap, albeit very well done fruit and soap.

With all that said, I'm still going to give it a thumbs up, because it really does smell good and only truly pales in comparison to scents I like better. And it's still miles ahead of your average fruity perfume...