Santos

Cartier had been selling watches and jewellery since 1847 when the house released its first men's fragrance, in 1981. Santos takes its name from Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian aviator for whom Louis Cartier had designed a watch worn on the wrist, at the turn of the century.

A name borrowed from the watch

The fragrance is thereby tied to the house's most recognisable object. Cartier sees in it a tribute to the pilot's adventurous spirit and claims a compositional challenge: holding together an aromatic freshness and an amber-woody sensuality.

The question of the perfumer

Wikiparfum credits Daniel Moliere, a perfumer at Mane to whom we owe Tam Dao for Diptyque and Insense for Givenchy. Cartier publishes no creation credit and the name is confirmed nowhere else: the perfumer field is left empty here.

A variation as early as 1982

Varanis Ridari reports a Santos Concentree released a year after the original, denser, more romantic and more linear. The 1981 eau de toilette has stayed in the house's men's fragrance catalogue, where most of its contemporaries have disappeared.

What Cartier says about it today

The house sums Santos up in three materials: the freshness of basil, the amber notes of clary sage, the elegance of cedar wood. The wording has not shifted from one country's version to another.