Acqua di Scandola
Eau de Parfum, Parfum d'Empire (2019)

A marine fragrance without the usual aquatic and/or ozonic notes that make things like Acqua di Sale so utterly horrible. Instead, it's much more of a lemony-herbal cologne but still somehow with a marine or coastal feel to it. If anything, there are aldehydes to add that extra fizz. Unfortunately, the nice, natural-smelling herbal notes fade fast and I'm left with a rather screechy and synthetic, if mercifully discreet, citrus-soap single note.

Most aquatic perfumes are awful. They are banshees shrieking their calone or dihydromyrcenol wails, clawing away at your nostrils before descending into nasty and predictable woody mossy dry downs. But, if there is anyone into whose hands I am willing to place my precious olfactory receptors to try to convince me that aquatic perfumes can be done well, can be evocative, and can be interesting, it’s Corticchiato. As usual, he doesn’t disappoint me.

Yes, it has largely the usual cast of characters that come with most aquatics but there are some pleasantly unexpected guests and plot twists. This calone laden aquatic salad is topped with hesperidics, basil, and artemisia. Nothing particularly new or interesting here, except that it is worth noting Corticchiato makes sure you can hear the individual voices in the well-done harmony of excellent materials; it’s nicely composed, smooth, and tasteful in the way most aquatics are not but that we would hope and expect from Corticchiato. So far so good. The heart genuinely smells of saltwater and seaweed thanks largely to the calones but also an unexpected but well-calculated use of a ginny juniper. The mineralic, watery, and tight fruitiness that comes with a gin note is minutely but cleverly steered in a direction that gives me an impression of getting a big whiff of stale seawater sitting on top of very aromatic shore-side tide pool rocks. I can’t truly say I’m enjoying the smell of it; it’s not making grin like an idiot, tingling my spine, or making me weak at the knees, but it is certainly interesting and pleasantly refreshing. In the high-heat of this summer day it has a palpable cooling effect. This mineralic, salty, woody juniper type accord strings its way down to the base where, ahem, we get a massive dose of tree moss. So, yeah, ok… predictable and typical, but! - Corticchiato does what few dare to do at this point, which is to give us a massive slug of it. In most aquatics the woody mossy dry down is insipid, gratingly sharp, and generally unpleasant. This is because most perfumers will not overdose an aquatic perfume with their house's materials of choice for the dry down because they know it stinks, and they don’t want it to stink too loudly. Corticchiato chose an excellent quality material for the tree moss dry down, and then pumps the base full of it. Some clever additions of a very non-peppery patchouli and hyrax amp up the earthy, animalic and musky nature of this base that, in summation with the woody tree moss, take this perfume to a more petrichor direction than I anticipated. It smells like the wet ground of a forest line at the shore of the sea.

Corticchiato’s materials of choice are so cleverly blended it’s hard to see where one ends and one begins, and that is most apparent with my perception that there doesn’t seem to be distinct heart and base layers so much as there is a massive base that lasts from beginning to end, imperceptible throughout most of the perfume’s life because of how cleverly it gets augmented by shorter lived materials. I realize, as should you, that this is Perfume Composition 101, but it still feels very novel in Acqua di Scandola simply because we rarely get this level of technical skill in an aquatic perfume!

So, while it might not be for everyone - much like the aquatic genre itself since it is challenging and generally doesn’t smell “pleasant” in the way most want perfumes to be - I think it might be for even fewer still, since those who like aquatics generally speaking like the garbage we have on our retail shelves. Therefore, I don’t see this being particularly popular for the brand, little alone popular in general. The small number of people who will like it, maybe even love it, are probably the nerds like me with a soft-spot for summer freshies and a challenging perfume, and can take note of the technical care that has gone into it. I hope I’m wrong. I hope it’s well liked, or becomes well liked with some time, and sticks around for a while. I think it’s fantastic, and in anticipation of being right, I bought two bottles just in case - yeah, I like it that much.

Acqua di Scandola by Parfum d'Empire (2019) gets beat up by old fragheads that still bemoan the existence of dihydromyrcenol or calone some 50 years on from when they entered the perfumer's lexicon, and only themselves know about these materials because perfumers made the mistake of name-dropping them in discussion, giving rise to such "bogeymen" in collector's circles where everything not a woody, mossy, musky, or resinous floral beast of antiquity is an abject failure. Well, it simply isn't so, and although there are a great many insipid ozonic or aquatic things that bank too heavily on novel synthetics or perfumer focus groups studying market trends, not every attempt at a truly ocean or aquatic-inspired fragrance is evil. It just so happens that there are only so many ways to reach such an abstract olfactive destination and yes, they do involve the use of some chemicals. Deal with it.

With that out of the way, Acqua di Scandola by Parfum d'Empire does indeed tread some familiar territory, set up a few years earlier by brands like Hermès with Terre d'Hermès Eau Très Fraîche (2014), and this may feel a bit like a rub when a considerably more-expensive niche brand is offering up something similar, although the Hermès is now discontinued too. Parfums de Marly Perseus (2024) also seems to take a stab at this particular theme too, so therein lies more opportunity for derision. The dividing line between the "plebian" luxury/designer space and the "enlightened" spaces of snob nose-candy like this really comes down to Marc-Antoine Corticchiato's use of hyrax here, giving the salty marine Mediterranean-inspired accord of Acqua di Scandola a muskier undertone to it than the competitors, who just bank on salty faux-ambergris. Artemisia, basil, and geranium really give the herbal garrigue prerequisite for anything taking on the Mediterranean style, but at the end of the day, this is really just a more-animalic Hermèssence Épice Marine by Hermès (2013)

Does that make Acqua di Scandola any good? Well, sure it does. If you're a fan of Épice Marine, Eau Très Fraîche, Perseus, or even the genre-founding Sel Marin by James Heeley (2008), this could be a good time for you. If the slightest bit of any aqueous aromachemicals makes you absolutely nauseous, and you have a dart board with Alberto Morillas' or Pierre Bourdon's face on it, with a candlewax-laden alter of worship to Jean Kerleo or Guy Robert in your closet, I might call a wellness check to your house to make sure you're not a danger to yourself and others, but I otherwise will leave you alone and say to avoid this perfume. It's an outlier to the usual Parfum d'Empire range for sure, and honestly I like it more for being "not another neoclassical exercise in trying to summon the ghost of Jacques Guerlain" or an artisanal take on dad's old Mennen aftershaves. This is an aquatic done with attention to detail, and artistic aplomb, but it still is an aquatic; a tiger can't hide its stripes. Thumbs up

Alas, an uninspiring and uninspired aquatic with a citrus start and a gentle but vague herbal filter. Has a large supporting cast of synthetics, including something that my nose reads like that most denatured of jasmines – hedione. Goes increasingly in the square jawed designer-aquatic-with-aromatics direction once the citrus accents fade, a kind of crushed-dried-herbs-carried-on-the-airco tendency that seems to equate these days with mall-trotting masculinity, but makes my nostrils feel like they are filling with strongly treated swimming-pool water.

Acqua di Scandola kicks off with citrus paired up with synthetics - ozone, eggy aldehydes, and salty calone. There are also greens, both the aquatic kind (cucumber and "marine" chemicals), as well as green herbs.

While the citrus is going, this strikes me as Creed-inspired (though much cheaper smelling with the low rent aquatic notes), but after the citrus fades, the focus is really on the way the aquatic chemicals and synthetics mix with the herbs, and it smells more like a 90's designer scent.

Honestly, there's nothing here that I really like, as a matter of personal taste. I've really enjoyed some Parfum d'Empire scents - I'm just not sure what they were thinking with this one...