Like Poison and Angel before it, Baccarat Rouge 540 is strong enough to smell on the moon. Also like them, it is sweet. Unlike them, this sweetness is shaped and flattened somehow. Smoothed. One imagines Kurkdijan in a hellfire forge, hammering molasses and maple syrup and the crystalline tops of every crème brulé ever made before lifting history’s greatest burnt sugar note to gleam, shiny and hard, in the light of a well-earned sunrise. 540 is the classic example of what the late fragrance writer Conor McTeague called Kurkdijan’s “precious metal glow.”
You may not grasp the appeal, but you cannot deny the presence—mysterious, awesome, seductively inhospitable—of seamless, ruthless technical perfection. Salted caramel, but make it Bauhaus. What if desert, but Le Corbusier. It smells like money the way Crassus did after being forced to drink hot gold; it foregrounds the lethal temerity of overaccumulation that has, in the decades since Angel and Poison, consumed more and more of public life. And that is the difference between Kurkdijan and those who came before him: in the same way Chinatown is a film noir that is about noir and also—somehow!—the best noir, Kurkdijan makes fragrance about fragrance.
In this sense he was the perfect person to create a flanker of the world’s best-selling perfume. And Sauvage Eau Forte is not the first time he has remixed an established hit. He lightened and brightened Pierre Bourdon’s bathouse epic Kouros all the way back in 2003. “But there was only one Kouros,” he said, while there were already four versions of Sauvage when it came time for him to add his own.
I was worried whether Kurkdijan would be able to cut through the baggage that Sauvage in particular and masculinity in general has accumulated. But I can report that Sauvage Eau Forte smells good.
It smells really, really good, actually, in a sparkling, clean, classical way. Not least because, in a revolutionary change that may become industry standard, Eau Forte is based in water rather than alcohol. This means that it opens immediately, without the typical five to six second wait for the scent of raw ethanol to burn off. Gone entirely are the Giorgio Moroder shield-generator synths and cyborg sperm-whale palpitations of the earlier Sauvages. In their place is a sharp, vivid lavender that is sober and smart without being joyless or corporate. It does not smell like a hangover, it smells the way someone who didn’t drink last night looks to someone who did, enviable and wise.
If there is a pinch of sadness to be found smelling Eau Forte, it is that its intelligence seems also to indicate, in a negative way, just how ridiculous men had let themselves get there, for a minute. If slavery, as Plato has it, is what happens when we are doomed to chase whatever instinctual desire happens to enter our conscious perception, and freedom, by contrast, is the capacity to regard these lures coolly and with maximum discernment, then Francis Kurkdijan’s Sauvage Eau Forte smells like freedom, because it smells like a man in control of himself.
