Elae
Trudon (2019)

It's one thing for a fragrance to be attractive. Elae is very attractive. This is without doubt. But it's another for a fragrance to truly move me, and Elae, while expertly crafted and exquisite, falls short of doing just that. It's as if its almost too perfect. It's like the uncanny perfect symmetry on a human face. They say we are attracted to symmetry, but if we generate a perfectly symmetrical face, there is something deep within our primate brain that somehow perceives the image is not quite real.

Elae has the perfectly laid out jasmine accord, sunny and pretty and a little wet, rendered golden and almost antiseptic by an exact neroli. There is the suggestion of yellow floral here, lending a bit of humidity, but besides that, it is lacking that "grit" that I would desire in such a composition. It's just a bit too niminy-piminy to excite me. It is immaculate, and that is its exact fault. Give me a floral that has a soul, a story, a bit of wear and tear in its undercarriage that lends an odor of sex and finitude. Give me that, not Elae.

I'm a huge fan of Cire Trudon candles and was really hoping to like this perfume, but it's not really working for me. It's a fruity floral - not as pedestrian as your basic strawberry/peach concoction, but still pretty unremarkable.

The fruity aspect is hard to name. It's sort of apple, but an aquatic, chemical, amorphous take on apple. The flowers are generically flowery, with a slight emphasis on tuberose, which adds plasticky loudness.

There's nothing specifically bad about Elae. If it were a celebrity scent or a discount-store candle, I'd shrug it off as passable, but I expect so much more from Cire Trudon that it's left me disappointed.