Le Pavillon d'Or
Dusita (2019)

Le Pavillon d'Or feels as if it's embroidered with crushed ivy leaves, obscure vegetation. Herbes de Provence, and dispersed among the foggy moors of my imagination. It begins with green sap and distant filmy flowers, a mollifying effect comes over me. There is a forest-like flavor, like Labrador tea, some armoise, and acorns, shrouded with orris, growing more powdery and blurry. Now there are misty oaks, autumn grasses, and heliotrope at dusk. I am then reminded of a thyme-scented soap imported from France I used some years ago.

From green to grey, bitter to sweet, it travels through twigs and stems, branches and boughs, further into the sweetest, most serene oblivion. It feels vintage, but also on another plane, like something an 18th century English poet would conjure up from imagination. I think of William Blake: "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself."

The combination of orris and oak in this fragrance emits a noticeable almond heliotrope accord in the mid notes, which gives it a reminiscent scent of baby wipes. However, I personally don't find any resemblance to Elektra from Olympic Orchid. Ultimately, this fragrance doesn't align with my personal style and preferences.

Interesting blend

Its an interesting blend. Iris, oak, mint, and fig. Sharper noses will then feel the heiotrope. Its a strange frag tht will, i think, not find many who make it their shining star, but it is capable and interesting. Not overly synthetic. A few edges are bared in the pursuit of that uniqueness. Its pretty expensive. Presentation is fantastic. Neutral, may go up.

Wow, what a blend – is it a woody green floral or a floral woody green or a green floral woody? Well, it's hard to tell at the start because the presence of all those categories is so unified in a light-filled whole that the gold referred to in this perfume's name is a radiance rather than the lumpen thing human's lust after.
The interplay of elements here is gauzy, a kind of fairy dance – so the mint is bright and cool but not at all sharp, the fig leaf brings its evocation of summer without any milky density, floral notes like honeysuckle and heliotrope float up gently rather than going for a power charge. The whole thing has an unclouded grace about it, and yet the greens are properly vivid, with the requisite bitterness about them, the flowers dotting the entire vista opened up. It's only the woody elements that are more shaded, offering unobtrusive support.
Calming and enjoyable, with moderate sillage.

Gosh, this is so pretty. Mint, iris, and honeysuckle combine to form a fresh, green opening that sometimes reminds me of Chanel. No. 19 and sometimes of Diorella (and sometimes of neither). There is an illusion of galbanum minus the bitterness, or of vetiver without its dankness. The main note here is fig leaf, which would explain the faintly milky quality to the greenness, but there's none of the urinous quality that often sullies the vibrant smell of fig leaf. There is also a whisper of fruit, but one so phantasmagoric that it might all be in my head.

These opening notes are quickly coated with an overlay of what smells to me like the sweet, musty alfalfa grass notes (half hay, half Quaker's oats) borrowed from one of my favorite Dusita perfumes, Erawan, but minus that scent's dusky cocoa. There is also, here and there, a touch of Chanel's Poudre Universelle Libre – a discreetly-perfumey, buff-colored skein of powder dusted over the scent's cheekbones.

Although perfumer Pissara Umavijani's inspiration for Le Pavillon d'Or was drawn from three different lakes, this perfume smells more pastoral than aquatic to me. It carries the green-gold-lilac duskiness of post-harvest meadows and field margins and hedgerows.

The final layer in this igari blush-style fragrance is a crepuscular haze of almond-scented lotion, due to the heliotrope, a plant beloved of midwives for its babyish innocence. But while in less elegant hands the heliotrope might turn fudgy and turgid in that yellow cake way of Etro's Heliotrope, Pissara has threaded the note through gossamer layers of green florals and iris so delicately that the finish retains the freshness borrowed from the first layer laid down. Simply lovely.