Barbicaja
Eau de Parfum, Spoturno (2025)

Do you cry when you remember how good vintage Caron was? Do you miss the old old Guerlain and Chanel? Good news, Spoturno exists.

This is a wearable classic, the orange blossom is strong. It's a note I struggle with a lot, I just don't naturally gravitate to it. If you see my reviews on orange blossom fragrances I usually have not a lot of nice things to say. I love other white florals. Here the orange blossom is paired with fresher florals, and blended very well. It's hard to see where they transfer over into one another. But you can pick up the different notes, it's just the boundary is unclear.

The lily of the valley is there, and balances out the orange blossom in a great way. Both are notes that can be overpowering, but here its a good balance.

The drydown is stunning, classic, subtle. It doesn't scream and shout for attention, it's just there being quietly amazing. If I liked orange blossom a little more this would be a no questions asked immediate wishlist bottle and bought within a month. It is so good!

The packaging of the samples feels lovely to the touch, I think it is used for the bigger boxes too. This makes me happy. This might be an odd comment, but the neuro spicy crowd might know what I mean :D

I won't waste any time with context or history in this review since everything I would feel the need to say is already in my review of Alphee (so, give that a read if you are so inclined). This is the second of the four Spoturno perfumes I have spent time with over the past couple of weeks, and I have to say that its opening and initial hours give me a better impression than Alphee, but, overall, it is still not quite the impression I was hoping for. Taking inspiration from the garden of the Coty home named Barbicaja in the Riviera, the perfume is purely and simply a floral. The opening is the best part, in my opinion: it's a very green floral start with what seems to be a lot of powdery galbanum. It's a pea type galbanum, soft and semi-sweet. But the brand credit muguet and hyacinth notes. I can certainly see hyacinth lurking amongst the greeness, so perhaps the powdery floral part is the muguet. Galbanum-forward perfumes - or, at least the ones that choose to open with a galbanum-like accord - have a tendency to be quite brash and sharp about it. In No. 19 for example, though we expect powdery and restrained and quietly luxurious French-chic from Chanel, the galbanum is definitely claws-out. Barbicaja puts the greeness very far forward in the opening, presenting it as very muscular and demanding of your intention, just like No. 19, but its claws aren't out. It's not sharp or brash, likely because it's been very well rounded-out and textured to a powdery softness by whatever is delivering the powdery floral note in tandem (muguet, it seems). It's very pleasant and grabs your attention without scratching you.

Thirty minutes in those top notes fade almost instantly to reveal a bright white floral heart - and I mean bright! Vivid, saturated, and electric white. But, yet again, I find myself a bit at odds with what Spoturno says I should be experiencing. To my nose, the heart smells of a very strong and very synthetic neroli. I say synthetic not in the sense that it's obviously fake and chemically - it's actually quite good and highly evocative - but it's so overdosed and electrically white and saturated that it must be synthetic. Just as the bright green and powdery florals of the top were out front-and-center demanding your attention, so is the heart. Spoturno says the heart should be calling orange blossom, tuberose, jasmine, and apricot. Fair enough on the orange blossom; there is a bit of a fruity citrusy backdrop to the floral accord that I can completely believe is orange blossom. But the tuberose, jasmine, and apricot? I suppose the materials used, when smelled individually and outside of the perfume, might smell of those notes, but, in Barbicaja's heart blended together as they are, I cannot help but recognize this as neroli. Mind you, this heart is so powerful and strident, closed-off and saturated, that it's hard to penetrate it to really see what's going on. My final point to my case for being at odds with the heart accord is that tuberose and jasmine have unmistakable qualities to them that I cannot pick-up here: mainly the rich, heady, creamy, slightly sweet and honeyed, almost chewy facet of tuberose, and the indolic/musky/animalic facet of jasmine - which should play hand-in-hand with each other to give an impression of something gently animalic but rich and supple. These words: richness, creaminess, musky or animalic, honeyed, heady, etc., cannot be used to describe the heart of Barbicaja in the slightest. Color me a bit confused while it colors itself a vivid white floral. That all said, it is still pleasant and very evocative. That unconscious reflex of very frequently raising my wrist to my nose when a perfume catches my attention played out a lot during the heart's life, but I'm doing it more out of curiosity than swoon.

The trend continues after 6hrs when I finally get to the base and, yet again, I'm not picking up what Spoturno say that I should be. I should be smelling cedar, vetiver, patchouli, and vanilla. I don't. Instead, the white floral accord continues leaving no impressions of woods, earthiness, or vanilla. I suppose what I could be smelling is a massive dose of Iso E Super, and maybe a very unusual synthetic vetiver material, to create the sharp white and green floral accord but it honestly doesn't seem that way.

Setting aside the fact that I am not smelling what I should be - which is a big ask of a brand for me - is Barbicaja any good? Well, I have a better impression of it than I do Alphee, but it suffers in one way that Alphee also does, and in another way that's different. Primarily, just like Alphee, Barbicaja is a missed opportunity to say something different. It seems the intention was to update an old/classic style of white florals for modern times, but modernity includes novelty. This is like a mid-20th century white floral played on an old tube television that's been upscaled to 4K: it looks better, but its high resolution and modernity is deceptive because it ends up looking fake. Just as new ultra-high-res televisions say they have the superior picture even though they just oversaturate the colors, we are struck by the colors and the clarity of the picture, but, we know, if we really think about it, what we're seeing doesn't look that way in real life. That white flower on the television is not that white in nature. That's the second issue. While attempting modernity and novelty of an old idea, Spoturno and Sheldrake have just made it obviously fake and unconvincing. Barbicaja is a good perfume, but not for the price being charged for it, not for the mandate Spoturno has given to themselves, and not by the abilities we know Sheldrake possesses. This UHD 4K television is not convincing me that this century old movie was only filmed a few months ago.