Palais Jamais
Etro (1989)

Palais Jamais is moor and heath in a bottle: highlands with high rains and lowlands with blazing sun. It starts damp, fertile, grasses, hay, dewy citrus and sun showers. The petitgrain is muted in pewter mist and smoky clary sage, the imagery in mind includes that of plants with tendrils, ivy perhaps, clinging to ancient stone or abandoned wooden structures. I have this view from a porch, sipping tea, overcoming the shellshock of a far too frenzied and hectic world we live in, and I get to come home to this.

Some music that accompanies the Palais Jamais: Brian Eno and Harmonia's "Luneberg Heath," mid-70s Genesis albums.

The heart has hints of jasmine in its tea and smoked woods. As the morning turns to mid-day, the sun sheds the dampness and dries the landscape, including the mosses, and the vetiver comes into relief, but is tempered by all the tea and leathery birch, oaky bark, the vegetal, sunny heath. The mist is now completely clear and the dry down reveals the rawness of the oakmoss and vetiver fully immersed in auric musk. Dusty, smoky, faded greens, and an ever changing landscape is what we find in this "Never Palace" and it's singular. What a scent. 

Etro Palais Jamais is distinctly personal and freeing. I liken Palais Jamais to the beginnings of each season, particularly spring and fall, where the landscape is reborn to eventually decompose; the evolving beauty taking evocative turns along with the ensuing scents that emanate from this ethereal cycle. There is seductive pull to this wonderland where the wooing is innate and fully whole, resulting in an uplift and a reset for all… Palais Jamais is a bottled aromatic of that process. With its initial citrus spritz shaped by a sharp coriander and a cardamom hint, there is a some kind of wonderful in the making towards a naturally dry, yet refined floral greenery. The leathery birchwood, the fragrant jasmine sambac, and the bitter orange foliage of Paraguayan petitgrain shape the tobacco hay slight of the maté absolute into a smoked, herbaceous green tea only to be augmented with a tasteful pepper, before the mossy dews, the rich vetiver strains and the soft sweetness of clary sage elevate as an ensemble towards a dusty green aura of freedom and change. Ahh, to begin the begin… Lovely!

Stardate 20190611:

Love the way it is constructed. Somehow the jasmine kills vetiver's green bite and vetiver destroys jasmine's skank. Or perhaps they mask it. In any case just superb.
Then there is the smell of tea which stays throughout in the background.
The vintage bottle had an apt tagline - Tea in the garden of Allah.

Buy the vintage gold cap bottle.

Very interesting and a sparkling beginning which goes into a more interesting and complex evolution. Green, earthy and woody. It has vetiver, tea, it's herbal, aromatic and smoky. And what a great name: "Palais Jamais".

If you miss the vintage formulation of L'air de Rien, try Palais Jamais. They are not identical, PJ is somewhat more citrus-oriented, but they definitely share that hazy, oak moss-y, halfway-between-organic-and-human feel that makes both of them such unusual and impossible to define scents. PJ has a bit more of a tea note going on, while L'air contains more dusty incense. I would also say that the Miller Harris frag lasts somewhat longer than the Etro. Regardless, if what you're after is an earthy but edgy, bohemian scent, this one has your name written all over it.

This is my second Etro sampling. I liked Etro Vetiver more than this one.

The opening of Palais Jamais has promise, and it's an interesting fragrance worth smelling, but it's not something I especially enjoy wearing. As it develops, it gets worse: more artificial smelling, less floral, more cloying.