Tom Ford Tuscan Leather

If Oud Wood was the Private Blend that made a difficult material easy, Tuscan Leather was the one that refused to. It launched with the same 2007 collection and it is still the most aggressive thing in the range: a leather built on raspberry and saffron, which on paper sounds absurd and in practice is the reason people have worn it for nearly two decades. Tom Ford's line about it is that the scent is raw yet refined, sensual yet sophisticated, and that is a fair description of a fragrance that opens like a fruit-bowl grenade and ends up smelling like the inside of an expensive car. The house publishes the structure. Saffron, raspberry and thyme sit at the top; olibanum, night-blooming jasmine and black suede form the heart; leather and amberwood hold the base. The raspberry is the signature and the controversy, jammy and almost synthetic for the first fifteen minutes, and it is doing a job, because it makes the leather underneath read as skin rather than upholstery. Saffron adds the metallic, slightly bloody quality that leather compositions need to feel real. Once the fruit burns off, what remains is dry suede, incense smoke and amberwood, and it stays there for a long time. Night-blooming jasmine keeps it from turning purely masculine. It is a statement fragrance and it should be treated as one. Cold weather flatters it; a Johannesburg winter evening is close to ideal, and heat pushes the raspberry into something cloying. Wear it out rather than to a desk, and not to anywhere with a fragrance-free policy. It is unisex in composition even though it is usually shelved as masculine. Performance is excellent and needs managing rather than boosting. Reckon on eight to ten hours of wear, the first three of them projecting strongly, and expect it to stay on a jacket for days. One spray is genuinely enough; two is a decision. Note also that a fragrance this old has been produced across many batches, and long-term wearers disagree about whether the raspberry sits as loudly now as it once did.