Terre d'Hermès Parfum

A denser earth

Elena Vosnaki devoted a Perfume Shrine review to the Parfum on October 9, 2009. She found in it a denser earth than that of the eau de toilette: flint and the mineral facets are heightened, benzoin is reinforced, and the composition gains gravity without straying from the original.

The critic finds shiso more perceptible in the opening, where it awakens the citrus notes. In her view, the extra cedar and mossy notes tip the fragrance from aromatic citrus toward a woody chypre of easy elegance.

An exercise in concept

Elena Vosnaki welcomes the rarity of an extrait for men, which she places alongside Guerlain’s Habit Rouge extrait. Yet she sees it as an exercise in concept rather than a necessity: the original, she writes, lent itself better to a graceful minuet than to a learned fugue.

Finally, she notes a bottle almost identical to that of the eau de toilette, barely squarer, to the point that she first thought, in the boutique, she was holding the eau de toilette, and she is surprised by a modest price for such a concentration.