Tauer Perfumes - Eau d’épices

An orange for October

When the leaves turn to flames on the maple trees and there are fat orange pumpkins for sale at my corner store, I start to crave perfumes that make me feel warm, perfumes filled with woods, incense and spices. Fall is usually the time of year that I put citrus scents to the back of the shelf. While I find them cooling and uplifting in hot weather, citrus scents are not what I typically want to wear in the Canadian autumn. Until now.

It took me a little while to warm up to Eau d’épices. Tauer Perfumes typically use high concentrations of their essences, and they can be strong to start.  Eau d’épices opens with a big blast of something that made me think of gasoline but it turns out to be an overdose combination of clove and cardamom. It takes a little while for these strong top notes to burn off and let the heart shine though.

In that heart are some gentler, warm spices and a lovely tart citrus that will be familiar to those who have tried other Tauer perfumes. Andy Tauer uses a juicy clementine or mandarin note in the opening of a few of his perfumes, such as Orange Star, Rose Chyprée, Le Maroc Pour Elle and Incense Rosé. I'm starting to think of it as one of his signatures. But in Eau d’épices the tangerine shines through the whole progression of the perfume, making it bright and lively.

The spices swirling around the orange aren't hot or foody, just dry and woody. Joining the pomander are fragrant orange blossoms. Like citrus, I usually like these white flowers in warmer weather, but they work perfectly in Eau d’épices, adding a light floral creaminess to the tangy orange and spices.

The drydown of Eau d’épices has the familiar "Tauerade" of incense and labdanum. I think there's ambrein in there; it's in many of Tauer's perfumes. Ambrein is a gorgeous extract of labdanum that Tauer describes in an interview with Nathan Branch as “pineta”, pine wood, ambergris on a chord of wood, dry fir needles under a Mediterranean sun, woody pine incense."  

In the same interview Tauer says that orange blossom and labdanum were two of the first essences he experimented with, his true loves. In Eau d’épices these two notes lift and sweeten the spices and create a beautiful resinous depth behind the orange note.

Leave it to Andy Tauer to create a citrus scent perfect for October. Eau d’épices is round orange moon rising above a dark spice forest.

House: Tauer Perfumes
Nose: Andy Tauer
Notes:
Head: An Indian basket of spices with cinnamon, cardamom, clove and corriander with red mandarines.
Heart: An opulent heart of orange blossom, jasmine, orris root and incense.
Body: A woody cistus ladaniferus resin, softened with ambergris, tonka beans and vetiver.

Photo: adaenn