Mandragore Pourpre

As many of you already know, I am a shameless Annick Goutal Mandragore fangirl (actually, I’m pretty much an Annick Goutal fangirl).  Mandragore is one of the few fragrances I wear often enough that I have had to replace the bottle.  So news of the overseas release of Mandragore Pourpre, a flanker, had me all atwitter.  Having gotten my hands on a few precious ml, I’m reviewing it today.

Some people are meh on original Mandragore EDT – the most common complaint I think is its lack of tenacity.  Other people find it a bit urine-y, which I’m assuming is an unhappy result of the boxwood.  I bought my first bottle in Paris, having fallen deeply and totally in love with it, and thus have no complaints about the original whatsoever.  I believe at some point they released an EdP, which would in theory have lasted longer, that was reputed to smell pretty much like the EdT (they don’t always).  If anyone tried the EdP, please chime in.

Mandragore Pourpre’s notes are bergamot, mint, star anise, amber, rosemary, geranium, black pepper, patchouli leaf, myrtle, incense and heliotrope.   (For comparison purposes: the original EDT’s notes are bergamot, black pepper, ginger, spearmint, star anise, boxwood, and sage.)

The fragrances smell enough alike that my mind said Mandragore before I popped the cap off the sample vial.  If you loathed the original, I’m not sure you’re going to like this one.  The first significant difference is that Pourpre starts off richer and sweeter on me, although it’s still very much unisex.*  Gone is much of whatever it is at the top of the EDT that is screechy – quite pleasantly screechy to my nose, unpleasantly so to others.  I’m going to hazard a guess that if you think you might like Mandragore without that urine-y note, you might want to try this one.

Then we go through fifteen or twenty minutes where the anise is much more pronounced on my skin, and this phase I am less delighted with.  It’s not that I’m against anise; but anise is one of those notes that, on me, tends to take over a fragrance, to the detriment of almost anything else interesting that might be going on.  I have a couple of anise frags, thanks very much, and am not looking for more.

Then that goes away, leaving a base that is somewhat richer, rounder and deeper than the original, although rich and deep are pretty relative here – we’re not talking Serge Lutens.  I would describe it as a warmer fragrance than the original, more ambery incense.  It certainly smells less like the freshly-squeezed grapefruit that Mandragore has always made me think of, even though it’s not part of the notes.

How do I like it?  Well… I am not sure.  I tried very hard to think of it as its own separate fragrance, since I’m so fond of the original it seems likely that any flanker will come up wanting in my mind.  And I’ve failed on my original mission.  If the pissy-grapefruit part of the original were unpleasant to me, or if I wanted something less astringent, I think I’d like this very much.  As it is, I found myself longing for the sharp edges of the EDT.

When I first smelled Mandragore, it was on one of those bone-chilling February days in Paris when we kept ducking into shops just to thaw our faces on the way back to our hotel, which is how we’d wound up in the Goutal boutique on Place St Sulpice.  I was only trying things to be polite to the very nice sales associate.  Mandragore was one of the strangest things I’d ever smelled.  I thought it was a little ugly and utterly compelling.  I still go through odd little Mandragore attacks where I’ll be doing something and realize I need to drop everything, run upstairs and put some on.  It would be nice if everyone had a fragrance they felt that way about.

So I’ll stick with the original for now.  For those of you for whom the original was close, no cigar, maybe you’d like this one better?  I assume it’ll show up stateside eventually.  I believe you can get it, like the original, either in the femme round bottle or the big square bottle as shown.

*Unisex.  Clarifying: I am a huge supporter of the idea that everyone can wear any style of scent they like.  Regular readers know I am particularly fond of men wearing very “feminine” things like rose and tuberose scents, which I find wildly sexy.  Fragrance knows no gender boundaries as far as I’m concerned.  So when I use terms like masculine, feminine or unisex when talking about fragrance, I am in no way suggesting that those scents should be bought and applied based on stereotype.  I’m simply trying to convey in our imperfect scent-language how the fragrance feels to me in terms of traditional styles of perfumery.