Tobacco Vanille

Gaia Fishler, The Non-Blonde

On October 7, 2009, Gaia Fishler found Tobacco Vanille easy to love and easy to wear. She found it sweet, boozy though less so than Guerlain’s Spiritueuse Double Vanille, rich and deep, and held back just short of comfort-scent territory: inviting, she wrote, but not snuggly.

On her husband, the tobacco comes to the fore; she sees this ability to change with each wearer as the secret of its success. In her eyes, a rich vanilla remains a safe commercial bet, one Tom Ford also made with Amber Absolute, and she does not hold it against him.

Marin Kristic, Scent Grail

Marin Kristic published his review in July 2022 and revised it in January 2024. He ranks Tobacco Vanille among his exceptional fragrances and credits it with perfumery’s turn toward sweeter compositions, begun in 2007, without finding it cloying.

He describes an opening of honeyed spices and leafy tobacco that reminds him of the pastries at a Christmas market; when the vanilla takes over, he picks up cinnamon, black pepper and star anise. He notes a whiff of cigarette smoke during the first hour, before a thick, elegant tobacco.

He wore a batch from November 2020 and finds that the powdery vanilla has survived the reformulations. He reserves Tobacco Vanille for winter, at the cost of some versatility, and makes it the benchmark against which future vanilla fragrances will be measured.