Les Heures Voyageuses - Oud & Santal
Cartier (2016)

Oud & Santal by Cartier (2016) is part of the Les Heures Voyageuses line, and it is quite interesting. Where every other oud fragrance made by a French or designer house on the planet was doubling down on stereotypical rose and oud tropes, or delivering the machismo with medicinal oud and patchouli treatments, Mathilde Laurent was over in the corner, being a total mad hatter by dosing aldehydes and plum notes into a fruity lactonic benzoin sandalwood scent with just the right amount of floral vanilla, that doesn't even really have any noticeable oud in it, calling it "Oud & Santal". In a bait and switch scheme that would make Le Labo proud, you buy this thing at face value and instead get the lovechild of Chanel Égoïste (1990) and Fabergé Organics shampoo, with just a slight wisp of medicinal oud a la what Mancera likes to use here and there, buried under javanol. Make no mistake, this is good, just not what you should expect. Cartier strikes again.

Nobody can ever say Cartier is boring, even if they veer just shy of being subversive like Etat Libre d'Orange. This opens with those bright aldehydes, the plum and what reads like a slight osmanthus ringout, with a lactonic element which then coasts into woodiness. This wood feeling is vague and abstract; never during the life of the perfume do you ever feel like you're being hit with an obvious sandalwood or oud note, and never during the entire experience do you even think of anything remotely resembling "arabic" or "exotic". Instead, this just thumbs along like a bit of a throwback 90's fruity floral aldehyde perfume, with almost milquetoast impressions of amber down there in the benzoin and olibanum somewhere, the woodiness and the plum as it comes forward to replace receding top notes. Performance is good, and Cartier seldom makes screamers, so don't expect "beastmode" from this either. I also find this perfectly unisex, but the Under Armour and flat-brim cap types will disagree with me as they suck down more TRT and add plates to the machine. So much creativity here, yet it feels like talking to the wind or taking a shot in the dark, which makes me a bit wistful.

Who is this for? Well, that's a real sticky wicket right there. I feel like the usual Cartier fans that love their quirks and features more than Doug Demuro likes trying to disguise sales videos for his website as car reviews, will be the folks really getting behind this. The kind of guys that still think life began with Santos de Cartier (1981) and ended with Pasha de Cartier (1992) can keep yelling at clouds for taking away their oakmoss and not pay this any mind; and the usual cats looking for the next hypebeast banger juice will also steer forty paces clear of this too, as it doesn't have a single drop of bubblegum in it. The late drydown here, if you manage to last that long, is the real magic of this particular creation, and had something like this hit the standard lines instead of this upmarket Les Heures Voyageuses collection, it might be the talk of online tastemakers and cults of personality everywhere; that's honestly the only people I see buying this without just being some rich person shopping Cartier jewelry and looking to round up a big sale. Thumbs up

Amazing multifaceted, rich oud fragrance from Cartier!

Oud & Santal take the best of both worlds - agarwood and sandalwood - and present a delightful amalgamation that just puts me immediately into the right mood! Oud is genuinely rubbery and smoky, and the sandalwood dreamy and creamy in a superior way. I swear there's amber in this, though it's not listed in the fragrance triangle: A cinnamon-y, somewhat sweet quality that deepens the experience.

Awfully hard to get a decant of this anymore! :-[

This is honestly one of the best amber oud perfumes I've tried.

It's a classic buttery lumberyard sandalwood mixed with benzoin, incense, and vanilla to form a wonderfully rich amber. There are pie spices and hints of dried fruits on top, while a charred, lightly rubbery oud gives depth of character while adding rich smokiness to the amber.

This sort of reminds me of Costume National's excellent Homme, with it's smoky buttery amber, though I think Oud & Santal's use of oud for smoke instead of the Iso E Super used by Homme is an improvement. Very well done.