Vanille Havane
Les Indémodables (2020)

A finely flavoured cacao tobacco amber ‘rummed’ up and pinched in ghostly 'garam masala', ripened fruits, darkened vanilla and indole tinges that bring to mind a Porto tipped cigar waiting to be chomped on... Beautifully lit in pungency and a fluid steer away from the usual sugary vanilla in the tabac wheelhouse. Boozy, burley and buttery!

Aged rum with tobacco and vanilla done RIGHT! One of the best in it's class. My only problem is when I will purchase a bottle. 8.5/10

The opening is exactly what I wanted it to be. Like sniffing a glass of aged rum that was left out for overnight and therefore lost it's potency. This part lasts only for about 3-5 minutes. The fragrance then slowly transforms into again, exactly what is says on the tin. Vanilla, tobacco leaves, cocoa.
The vanilla here is dry, masculine, slightly earthy. The tobacco is present, like the smell of damp, fresh tobacco leaves. The cocoa dances with all of these notes, comes and goes but too weak to take the lead.
The overall experience is nice, gourmand. The boozyness quickly fades away. The main notes stay present and linear. Masculine, toasted vanilla with appearing cocoa and tobacco notes. The scent cloud is powdery, dry, semi sweet. Imagine taking out the floral and fruity notes from Guerlain's Shalimar edp. This is what you get. A deep dive into the basics. If you found Tobacco Vanille or Tabac Rouge too sweet and cloying then try this fragrance. Very good option for a masculine vanilla.

This seems to be a love it or meh fragrance. I fall into the love it group. I had tried TF Tobacco Vanille and liked it a great deal. Bought a bottle. But I liked it, did not love it (found it too sweet, soft, and not complex enough). So I searched for an alternative and tried a fair number of similar scents (a list of what I tried is below). After all this searching, Vanille Havane won out. For me, it is the perfect mix of a tobacco (a dry tobacco) with rum boozyness (with a touch of cognac) and vanilla over dark fruits, some honey sweetness (but not honey per se), cocoa, and amber. The amber and cocoa come out more in the dry-down but the basic mixture of tobacco, rum/cognac, and vanilla persists throughout. I found others in this genre to be either too sweet or too robustly tobacco-oriented. The mix of notes here, by comparison, sings for me. Perhaps those who might have mixed feelings about this prefer tobacco/vanilla scents that lean one way or the other. This, for me, has the mix just right. I also find the scent to be a natural one; others I tried oft-times had synthetic resonances. None here.

Also have to note that it has – for me, at least – great durability. Lasts and lasts. The projection and sillage are also above average but not overpowering – basically it’s in my desired zone.

All in all, this is my go-to, perhaps I might say signature scent, for the colder half of the year.

Those I also tried included: Tobacco Vanille (obviously, as I mentioned it), Tobacco Oud, Herod, Spicebomb, Red Tobacco, Mystery Tobacco, Tobacolor, Sundowner, Chergui, Ambre Russe, Bourbon, Mona di Orio's Vanille, as well as other more fundamentally vanilla scents. So, yes, I did try a fair mix of others.

Vanille Havane is an undeniably good smell. How could it not be? It is basically a Greatest Hits tour of some of the most feelgood smells in modern niche perfumery, from the boozy sparkle of the vanilla-benzoin Eau des Missions and rough pain d’épices of Tobacco Vanille to the leathery black vanilla pod of Mona di Orio Vanille, the singed marshmallow of By the Fireplace, and the sticky, concentrated Coca Cola goodness of Tom Ford Noir Extreme (albeit dustier and more masculine than any of these). I am willing to overlook a perfume being slightly derivative as long as it smells great, and this one does. I’m particularly enamored of the far drydown, which smells like brown sugar and book paper that’s been toasted in a low oven.

A couple of things make me think less of it, though. First, sniffed up close, near to the skin, you can smell each one the blocky components of the perfume separately, from the intrinsic density of natural absolutes like tobacco absolute to the rather scratchy synthetic wood aromachemical they’ve chosen for radiance (this disappears fast, to be fair). In the air, these elements come together in a synergistic way and it smells fantastic, but on the skin, it’s like catching your father in his Santa suit putting presents under the tree when you were seven.

Second, Vanille Havane doesn’t take me on a journey. The older I get, the more I need my perfumes to be more than a good smell – they need to stir my imagination or feeling so that I feel less dead inside. Just kidding. But what I mean is that a good perfume – to me – is more than a hodge-podge of good-smelling materials thrown together for effect. And Vanille Havane, good-smelling as it is, is definitely a hodge-podge.

Lastly, there is a rough and slightly cheap ‘indie oil’ edge to this perfume that allows me to mentally rank it alongside several of the Kerosene perfumes, especially Blackmail and Broken Theories, with a little of the excellent (and chewy) Vanilla Pipe Tobacco by Solstice Scents thrown in for good measure. To be clear, I’m really fond of that indie oil edge as long as the perfume in question remains at a price point that doesn’t make me wish I’d ponied up the extra €100 it would take to buy a bottle of Mona di Orio’s Vanille.

Opens with a sweet and sour cherry/rum aroma combined with cocoa and vanilla in a dark atmosphere. It's kind of gourmand in the opening. There is a base of amber and leather that shows itself more clearly in the drydown (which is not my favorite part of this perfume). This perfume, as someone else mentioned, has a powdery cosmetic-like finish. The tobacco is not stronger than the other notes here. It can be said that it's a cherry-tobacco scent on a heavy base of amber/leather. Very warm, very sweet, dark, sharp and thick.
I'm mainly interested in the smell of boozes, but there are elements here that make the scent ordinary and unattractive to me. I don't know, maybe using a non-negligible dose of amber in this perfume wasn't appropriate. Its smell isn't aggressive or synthetic, the problem is that it's too regular(!), like many perfumes before itself (especially in the drydown). I would have preferred it to smell more like a man who has smoked tobacco and drunk alcohol. but this perfume, like many other perfumes, fails to do so.