Tabac Rose
BDK Parfums (2020)

Tabac Rose has the notes mentioned on the label, but it's a very discordant brew that takes hours to round into something enjoyable. The top notes seem kind of herbaceous or astringent to me. There's rose in there, but it's overpowered at first by the notes previously mentioned, and then the rose disappears pretty quickly. It's not that great of a rose scent either ... it felt overly-sweet and not very complex. Then, gradually, the remaining notes blend into a more or less harmonious, rather gourmand, pleasant scent. That phase seems to last several hours. I like that part. But getting there was pretty rough. This scent is hard to recommend.

Tabac Rose by BDK Parfums (2020) is a fragrance that I needed some time with to determine if I really liked it or not, which is something that can be said of many fragrances I review, except the reasons here for it are a little less common than for most other perfumes I've tried. Firstly, I didn't immediately understand this as the rose and tobacco fragrance the name on the bottle proclaims, which had me thinking there was a mistake. Secondly, if you had shown me this blind without a name, I'd have assumed we're dealing with another Western synth-oud competing with the Maison Francis Kurkdjian range of ouds. Third and finally, when the dust settles and the weirdness subsides, I get more of a gourmand patchouli rose and woody-amber scent than anything else, which is literally none of the above. Taken in as a whole, I was confused, and I don't like being confused by fragrances; hence I needed some time to figure out if I actually like this, and I don't. One gripe is Tabac Rose rides dangerously close to the big commercial "masstige" niche brands in style, which is something BDK had avoided in past collections prior to this release. We don't need any more alternatives to the Tom Ford Private Blend collection please, especially if they aren't significantly cheaper per ounce, and most of the "smells expensive" things made these days are also forgettable; so BDK is flirting with disaster here worse than Molly Hatchet. Although to be fair, this isn't the first, nor likely the last BDK scent cashing in on cynicism.

The opening of Tabac Rose has a really strange medicinal oud-like tone followed by lemon, loads of pink pepper, and the very start of what smells like a rather artificial rose note coming in. At this stage of the game, you might be thinking you're sniffing some cute-rate take on the usual "luxury blob" of Initio or Parfums de Marly, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong, since the fake patchouli saffron and artificial musk over woody-amber backfill already starts up even before we hit the middle. The notes in the pyramid are mostly all there, they just appear in the wrong order from how they're listed by the brand, in my experience. The fake oud smell and luxury blob do give way to a rounder, jammier rose note, although it still smells fairly impressionistic, and not like real Turkish rose jam or even the old carnation-padded jammy rose notes of decades past. Cinnamon and cocoa mix with some vanillin to create the gourmand experience I mentioned above, and although I can feel how the perfumer was going for a plum note with something like frambinone or similar, it doesn't read like any lucid plum notes I've known. Eventually the musks and woody notes merge with the "chocolatey" patchouli, the candied rose, and a late-stage tonka (tobacco I suppose); which then on the whole wears okay if this sort of "slightly cheaper Initio DNA" thing is something you enjoy. Performance is good and long, although this is too cloying for anything outside winter, and this perfume feels unisex leaning feminine to my nose.

Tabac Rose comes across to me like Julien Rasquinet understood the assignment, but maybe David Benedek of BDK Parfums himself perhaps didn't actually understand who he was dealing with when hiring this perfumer. The early perfumes created by Benedek himself were a bit more simple, straightforward "standard" niche tropes that exude the usual "perfume for connoisseurs who like picking apart what's in the fragrance" since identifying individual notes made niche fragrances feel higher-end than the blending of abstract materials like in your modern designer. Nomenclature for Tabac Rose suggests that would be the case here too; but as this was four years away from the launch collection and Benedek had "graduated" to Creative Director of his own (by then larger) brand, he forgot that industry perfumers like Rasquinet (student of Pierre Bourdon) had been working in the abstract for years since they have mostly abstract chemical materials at their disposal per the budgets and briefs of once again, designer and "masstige" clients. The result? A fragrance that ultimately gives you some semblance of "Tabac Rose", but only smells like either if you really squint when looking at the word on the bottle. This is a perplexing not-rose-patchouli-oud-in-disguise though, and if you overlook the name, overlook the commonly-abused materials and market segment malaise, then wait until the dry down to judge it, you might find something here worthwhile; I just don't enjoy being confused though. Neutral

Tabac Rose by BDK Parfums.

Tabac Rose has a nice harmony of uplifting and lyrical accords alternating with dry dark softness. Tabac Rose becomes its own thing as opposed to being a rose fragrance or a tobacco fragrance. The rose element in this scent is introduced by Italian Citron (lemon) and Plum for a jammy tart rose accord at the opening. This is softened a bit by pink pepper. The lemony citron plays a dominant influence with the gentle turkish rose which also gathers a hint of spice from pink pepper. This opening accord of citron, plum, turkish rose and pink pepper results in the pleasant tone of this scent and undulates through the dry soft base. Underneath the opening is a cool soft base of dry chocolate, tobacco leaf and patchouli which rests on a warm base of labdanum. There is a light cooling powder to the base of this scent, but not too powdery as in VC&A's Midnight Patchouli which has similar personality but is softer. The base accord is strong powdered chocolate + patchouli which seems to completely cover up the tobacco which adds only a bit of dry leaf to the base. This chocolate patchouli and tabac base reminds me a bit of the patchouli chocolate in Sammarco's Bond-T which is a remarkable scent that isolates this base combination entirely without roses or citron. The opening elevates upward with lemony, plum and rose then undulates downward with a cool dryness of chocolate, patchouli and tobacco. The labdanum base disappears into the background. At first I felt that this scent is slightly feminine because of the relatively high pitched and light tones. But I now see it as a unisex scent with a slightly higher register of tone. I would rate this scent 3.5 of 5 stars.