Deep Forest

Deep Forest is one of the more unusual things Mancera has released, and one of the more argued-about. The Paris house, which dates itself to 2008 and speaks of a family collaboration between a traveller and the heir to his artistic vision, built its reputation on loud, high-concentration orientals. Deep Forest, from 2019, takes that house strength and points it at something smokier and stranger than the rose-oud template most of the catalogue follows.

The opening is dense rather than fresh. Leather, incense, clove and agarwood arrive almost immediately, with bergamot and orange doing very little to soften them, so the first ten minutes can feel abrupt if you are expecting a citrus lift. What happens next is the interesting part. Violet rises through the smoke, and violet against incense is an odd, powdery, slightly cosmetic effect that reads either as sophisticated or as soapy depending entirely on your skin. Orange blossom, rose and patchouli fill in around it. The base is Mancera at its most conventional, with amber, vetiver, vanilla and white musk giving a warm, woody, faintly sweet finish that lasts long after the smoke has gone.

The name suggests something green and wet. It is not that at all. It is a dry, dusty, incense-and-violet woody that would suit a cold, still Highveld night far better than a forest walk.

The honest assessment matters here more than usual. Deep Forest carries the weakest average rating of any fragrance in this selection, and the split in opinion is consistent: people either find the violet-and-incense heart genuinely distinctive or find it powdery and old-smelling. Performance is not the problem, as Mancera's concentrations mean eight hours or more with a substantial first hour. Note also that Deep Forest is not currently listed among the fragrances on Mancera's own website, and the house publishes no perfumer credit for it, so everything beyond the bottle itself comes from secondary databases. Sample before committing to a full bottle.