Ombré Leather

Tom Ford presents Ombré Leather as a spicy floral leather. The house names six key notes, a black leather accord, cardamom, jasmine sambac, patchouli, white moss and amber, without dividing them into tiers.

Top

Cardamom opens the fragrance. It is the spice the house keeps among its key notes, for a floral leather it describes as lifted by cool spices, under the open sky of the American West.

Heart

The black leather accord dominates the fragrance. The house credits it with a supple, tactile sensuality. Jasmine sambac brings the floral tones that, in its words, conjure wild desert beauty. Its page also illustrates the fragrance with a violet flower, absent from its key notes.

Base

Patchouli and vetiver give the leather its texture, the house writes. Layers of amber and moss, a moss it calls white, mimic the heat of rock and sand; vetiver, named in its description, does not appear among the key notes.

What stays out

Saffron, often attributed to Ombré Leather, appears neither in the key notes nor in the house’s description. The raspberry The Candy Perfume Boy perceives is not there either, nor is the treemoss long credited to the fragrance.

What the label declares

The ingredient list published by Tom Ford opens with alcohol, fragrance and water, along with galaxolide, a synthetic musk. It also includes Iso E Super, a synthetic ambery wood, a musky lactone, patchouli oil and Virginia cedar oil.

Further down come methyl octynoate, a molecule that smells of violet leaf, rose ketones, vanillin and several declared allergens, including linalool, geraniol and cinnamyl alcohol. No UV filter or colorant appears on it.