Breakfast Time by Carl Vilhelm Holsoe
According to Tania Sanchez, in “Perfumes: The Guide”, the one scent that men can’t resist is bacon. Of course no one really wants to smell like bacon. That doesn’t mean the breakfast milieu isn’t rife with possibility for a fragrance. Certainly the fruit aspect of the morning meal has been amply represented but the other members of the first meal of the day like milk, cereal, and vanilla bread are infrequently combined. The only true cereal with milk perfume I’ve encountered has been Lostmarch Lann-Ael. That felt like what is left in the bowl after the milk has soaked some of the essence out of the cereal and it was unusually comforting. Pierre Guillaume has chosen to plumb some of these same notes in his latest limited edition Tonkamande.
Pierre Guillaume has always had a deft hand when it comes to gourmand fragrances. The other limited edition released along with Tonkamande, Praline de Santal, is a lush chocolate and hazelnut olfactive confection on a sandalwood platter. Tonkamande is a gourmand of an entirely different style as it carries a lighter quality. M Guillaume’s choice of the hay and vanilla duality that tonka presents, as the hub of Tonkamande, allows for these lighter notes to have a central focus to work around. This makes Tonkmande something different from the other gourmands in the Parfumerie Generale oeuvre.
Breakfast by John Frederick Pato
M. Guillaume uses a quirky combination of a milk accord laid over aldehydes. Sometime aldehydes can add sharpness and if M Guillaume chose poorly these aldehydes could have curdled his milk accord. Instead he chose wisely and these are fizzy soft aldehydes which surround the milk accord and pop in a sweet spray throughout the early development of Tonkamande. The tonka then takes its place and early on the vanilla character mixes with the milk. Almond turns it slightly nutty but warms Tonkamande up for a wheat accord that smells like fresh bread. The tonka reacts and the hay-like quality adds a subtle sweetness to this middle phase. Vanilla in the base turns Tonkamande more surely sweet and it is balanced with a quieter sandalwood than the one M Guillaume used in Praline de Santal. This quietness matches the overall feel of a quiet morning at the breakfast table.
The Queen at Breakfast by The Duke of Edinburgh
Tonkamande has slightly above average longevity and average sillage.
Sometimes there is beauty in the serene moments between bursts of activity. With Tonkamande it seems as if M Guillaume wants us to spend some time in that last quiet moment at the breakfast table. I found that as I wore Tonkamande it allowed me to elongate that serenity into the bustle of the day. Tonkamande shows that M Guillaume still has more to explore in the gourmand genre, happily so.
Disclosure: This review was based on a preview sample provided by Parfumerie Generale.
–Mark Behnke, Managing Editor