Santal Carmin
Atelier Cologne (2014)

Santal Carmin is a wonderful and slightly odd sandalwood fragrance that smells more like hot milk, Petit Beurre biscuits, and the inside of a new car than actual sandalwood. Its creaminess is slightly generic, featuring a paint-by-numbers porridge accord that one often experiences in more gourmandy sandalwoods. But it has its attractions too, such as the flash of something citric up top to lift the scent into the air, and that guilty-pleasure nursery pudding facet in the drydown.

Sweet, citrus top. Candy sweet. Calms down quickly. Pretty, little saffron note. Light, fresh wood moves in. Cloudy musk. Mellow movement. The saffron and woodiness here are actually a good mix. This is a somewhat surprise considering how this all began.

A thin papery, old paper vibe, emerges. Not old and moldy paper - just antiqued. It mixes with cedar, like from an old Lane chest. Subtle vanilla moves in, mixing with the woods. Still some saffron hanging around. Whole thing ends up being semi-sweet later. Wood and vanilla linger on and on.

A nice crowd-pleasing type scent and clear complement getter. A designer type sweet, woody, thick scent with niche-like quality. Warm ambiance overall with a sandal-wood / rose-wood smell with some candied fruit, going almost jammy-sweet. Weirdly Bringing to mind both Egoiste and Joop Homme, then perhaps the milky warmth of the new male Cartier L'envol. The formula is kept quite simple yet effective here. I like it but it doesn't really excite me. It seems to be at a rather expensive price point.
68/100

A little sweet, a little creamy, definitely woody with juicy lime. The vanilla is fresh, creamy and eatable and it plays a big supporting role to the front playing woods. Mostly linear on my skin.

Santal Carmin is less focused on sandalwood than I had hoped, but it does conjure some of the ideas sandal would suggest–warm, creamy, hints of spice. There's a brief (five minute?) lime opening in line with most other AC frags, then the citrus remains as a sherbet sort of sweetness. I find this to be more suede-like as a whole, I guess it's what they're calling “saffron” mixed with a hint of “vanilla”–I use quotes because these notes are neither strong nor expressive. But always in the background of this is the “papyrus”, a note AC seems dependent on that I find absolutely atrocious. It appears in so many of their fragrances, and I am at a loss as to why. It's less pronounced here than it is in some others, but it just adds this unpleasant and grating unnatural sweetness that brings down the whole composition.

Why did I buy so many Atelier Cologne samples at one time? Besides some of the more straightforward citruses, I haven't found much to love, or even like in the line. Really soft (both in texture and projection), very femme, ultimately pretty boring to me and too compromised by that papyrus. Try Papillon's Anubis instead… (4/10)

A very (positively) special unisex fragrance. A lot of vanilla with fruit and wood. I love it.