Penhaligon's Sartorial

Penhaligon's began with William Henry Penhaligon, a Cornish barber who set up in London in the Victorian era near the Turkish baths on Jermyn Street, and the house has held royal warrants over its history. That English, slightly eccentric register is the thread running to Sartorial, released in 2010 and credited by the house to the master perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour. The brief was unusually specific. Sartorial is drawn from the workrooms of Norton and Sons, the bespoke tailors at 16 Savile Row, and it is an attempt to bottle a room rather than a mood. Penhaligon's own copy is exact about it: cardamom and leather scenting every thread, steam and lavender ironing out the creases. The full note list is long. Metallic notes, aldehydes, cardamom, water notes, black pepper, violet leaf, ginger and neroli at the top; lavender, beeswax, leather, linden blossom and cyclamen in the heart; and oakmoss, honey, patchouli, tonka bean, amber, vanilla, white musk, myrrh, cedar and gurjum balsam beneath. The metallic notes and the aldehydes are the point of the whole thing. The opening genuinely smells of hot metal and steam, like a pressing iron on damp wool, which almost no other fragrance attempts. Underneath that sits a proper old-school fougere: lavender, honeyed beeswax and leather, warm and slightly waxy, with oakmoss giving it the dry, mossy floor that most modern fougeres have lost. It smells like a workroom that has been used for a century, and it manages that without becoming a novelty. It is a cold-weather, dressed-up fragrance. A Cape winter evening under a coat suits it exactly; in real heat the beeswax and honey can turn thick. It is sold as a men's fragrance and wears that way, though the lavender-and-honey heart is not aggressively gendered. Performance is very good for the concentration: seven to nine hours, moderate reach early on, and a long, close, honeyed-mossy trail afterwards. It is not a crowd-pleaser and it is not meant to be. Anyone expecting a modern clean fresh scent will find it strange and old-fashioned; anyone who likes classical structures will find it one of the best-value niche fragrances still in production. Penhaligon's continues to sell it, and it has not been discontinued.