La Raison Pure
L'Antichambre

The listed notes for Raison Pure are very similar to Poivre Rose -- and yet the scents are substantially different.
Here, the emphasis is on a minty-herbal note which comes from the sage. This note is very persistent. It has a kind of soapy-fresh aspect which is pleasant and at times powerful.
The spices are subtle and the incense likewise. The wood is a rather minor component.
The cool mint works well with the warm spices, they contrast each other well.

La Raison Pure notes are: Sage, pepper, nutmeg, incense, cedar. La Raison Pure smells very similar to Le Poivre Rose by L' Antichambre with identical notes listed except for sage which replaces clary sage in Poivre Rose. The nutmeg, pink pepper, incense and cedar base could almost be a house note with L'Antichambre. This scent is minimal and clear headed wood and spice refreshing fragrance. La Raison Pure would be a very excellent replacement for an eau de cologne as a daily wear refreshing fragrance relying on sage and pink pepper to replacer citrus and florals. There is a level headed quality about this fragrance which might become boring after awhile. La Raison Pure is pleasant to smell, but with a high price of entry for a purchase is not good value for this otherwise pleasant but now commonplace light woods scent.

La Raison Pure opens with an extremely light spray of gentle black pepper and peppery herbal sage before transitioning to its woody incense heart. The woody incense heart accord is quite liquid smooth as it melds with just the faintest hint of the highly dissipated pepper notes from the open. In the late dry-down the incense slightly recedes to allow the cedar to shine more brightly as the minimalist scent abruptly comes to the end of its quite linear life-cycle. Projection is minimal and longevity is below average at about 6 hours on skin.

After getting past the slightly different peppery spicy/herbal top notes, I was certainly enjoying the smooth woody incense heart of La Raison Pure before it dawned on me that the accord smelled extremely familiar... It really should not have taken me as long as it did to realize that the heart accord I was smelling here is *extremely* similar to a favorite of mine released last year that I added to my collection called LiquidNight by A Lab On Fire. LiquidNight utilizes hinoki instead of cedar wood to meld with the smooth incense, but the end result is very close indeed. Maybe the La Raison Pure smells just a tad more natural and less sweet on the whole (actually La Raison Pure is not sweet at all, as it lacks the vanilla in the base of LiquidNight), but it fares far worse in the performance department with its inferior projection and longevity. My guess is after the top notes it would be hard for most to tell the two scents apart and I find it hard to recommend La Raison Pure accordingly as LiquidNight sells for $110 for 60ml versus $170 for 50ml of La Raison Pure. To be fair, the latter is a parfum strength versus an eau de parfum of the former; but as LiquidNight smells just as good if not better on the whole with much better performance, the concentration differentials don't appear to mean much. While I can't recommend it for purchase due to LiquidNight being the better value, La Raison Pure certainly smells very good and earns a strong 3.5 to 4 star out of 5 rating.