Les Heures Voyageuses - Oud Vanillé
Cartier (2023)

An excellent perfume. Very deep and textured, but quite simple as well. Instead of being a pyramid composed of notes, it is instead a smell all its own.

The opening is slightly challenging. The oud begins a little rubbery, a little animalic. Then I get something like a very elegant bonfire: woods, smoke, and golden embers that fly up into the night.

The base is where this perfume shines. Smoky, woody, resinous, and a brilliant, golden vanilla. The vanilla sparkles like cut glass illuminated by candlelight. Truly wonderful. It's supported by something green and slightly sharp or floral to my nose - angelica? coriander? mint? moss? ylang? It doesn't matter, it's gorgeous.

The oud provides a wonderful foundation. It's wonderfully light while remaining slightly sour. Mysterious, elegant, restrained. All of the materials feel extremely high quality and natural.

Oud Vanillé is a rare 5/5 in my book.

Oud Vanillé by Cartier (2023) is one of the most recent oud treatments in the Les Heures Voyageuses range from Cartier, and it is mostly a molly-wopping with ethyl vanillin. My guess is Mathilde Laurent threw the marketing department a bone the same way she did with Pasha Edition Noire de Cartier (2013) and La Panthère Parfum de Cartier (2020), something generic and pleasing enough to be the cash cow that justifies the lower-volume stablemates that might not bring in the same profits (or any profits). This is something even so-called elite ranges of exclusive fragrances need, since sales growth is the only thing that pleases the overlords, and something in every slot needs to be fine-tuned for mass appeal, even if paradoxically that isn't the claimed point of these collections.

To that end, if you want a boring, but well-blended vanilla scent with a creamy baked-good vibe, drizzled in just a tad of synthetic oud built up with a bit of violet leaf petrol and patchouli, smoothed with saffron and cashmeran musk. This is the spiky/earthy oud interpretation that normally comes across like a "scouring powder" note in Tom Ford perfumes, but you see that even such a harshly synthetic oud note can be harmonized when a perfumer who has the care of Mathilde Laurent wields it. The fact that the paradigm shift to being mostly about vanilla in order to balance such a harsh woody-amber scratch oud is necessary speaks to the evils of the materials themselves, and how they're overly-optimized for performance over palate. This performs admirably, if you're concerned about it.

I haven't smelled a ton of things from this range as of the writing of this review, so with only Oud & Santal (2016) to compare, I'd say this is the diametrically-opposite knee-jerk away from experimental creativity and left-turn shenanigans we expect from Cartier, and instead represents the source of income to support such creativity. The usual luxury-obsessed numpties that want to drip themselves in ooey-gooey smotheringly-sweet nonsense to feel decadent will run out and buy this, ultimately proving the cynicism of the corporate dreadnought correct once again; but so long as the deep-pocketed shallow-minded TikTok types keep slathering themselves in this, Cartier can afford to continue bottling my favorites, so I am at peace with it. Neutral

The ad copy is clear: Oud Vanillé is a blend of oud and vanillin, nothing more, nothing less. Points for accuracy in advertising!

The vanillin is very blunt. It's an odd kind of vanillin dose, because it hasn't been sweetened. It's pasty, as though it only exists as a kind of off-white aromatic canvas for the oud.

That oud is a dark oud, very different from that in Oud Radieux. It's an animalic-earthy-petrol oud, the likes of which has been mimicked by harsher synthetic blends (the Tiziana Terenzi Gold Rose Oudh and Nero Oudh try to approximate it). It's round and fuzzy, developing a sort of cozy chocolate-y patchouli feeling as it wears.

At first the oud contrasts with the vanillin, the animalic and petrol elements standing out in stark contrast to the initial slug of unvarnished vanillin, but as both elements soften, those aforementioned chocolatey facets of the oud begin to play with the vanillin to create a smell like a soil-infused dark chocolate brownie mix.

Depending on your perspective, Oud Vanillé is either so direct and simple that it feels unfinished, or its simplicity is in service of a higher cause by celebrating an undercelebrated, quasi-gourmand facet of oud.