Mer & Mistral
L'Occitane (2014)

Starts off very aquatic and citrusy; lots of lemon notes. On drydown it becomes much sweeter but still in an aquatic way: the citrus notes leave and are replaced by some sort of floral. The basenotes smell of musk with aquatic notes, sort of like ambergris. Very unisex and androgynous; doesn't lean masculine or feminine overall. Sillage and longevity are both moderate but leaning strong. Overall it's a pleasant scent but a bit sweet/feminine-leaning at times: it is perfectly unisex but I prefer overtly masculine-leaning fragrances. In any case, I like it.

This is a fresh, clean seaside scent that would be right at home with a striped fisherman's shirt and espadrilles, thrown in the string bag with the beach towels and Vichy water. A unisex scent, this is what I imagine both David and Catherine smelling like in Hemingway's "Garden of Eden," his posthumous novel full of sun-tanned androgyny and gender reversal set among the pines and sea of the Camargue. This is a cleaned up version of Profumi di Pantelleria's Maestrale but with just enough musk in the base notes to suggest that after the beach, there is always the bed.

The fresh opening is citrus-based, lemon and orange, simple but nice. The drydown reminds me of Italian forests with pine and cypress notes, and later takes a mildly ozonic turn, with whiffs of salty sharpness too. A white musk base provides a pleasant final.

However cliché this might be, it is nicely executed, has decent sillage and projection with five hours of longevity. 3/5