Une Nuit Nomade

mainstream niche

Une Nuit Nomade has been around since 2012, though I’d never heard of them until now. Their patter is all about travels to faraway places. It should be noted that the French are travel gourmets, the kind who book holidays three years in advance to Himalayan kingdoms that only let in six foreigners a year. Go to the far ends of the earth, take a train for three days, two short hops in an An-2 biplane, and a day or two on horseback; when you finally get to that little tea room cut into the side of a precipitous mountain gorge, you will invariably find a couple of retired high-school teachers from Clermont-Ferrand discussing Greco-Buddhist statuary. These are the people that mystically glue France together. If they all simultaneously missed their flights back at the end of August, the country would collapse.

Une Nuit Nomade, it seems to me, aims to keep these intellectuals amused during the long months they spend meticulously planning their next trek. The Extrait de Voyage discovery kit is an immaculate piece of packaging, complete with a beautifully printed booklet in dark blue with contrasting gold accents. The bottles are superb, also blue and gold, with lovely typography and finish, the brand name written in a preschool cursive reminiscent of Niki de Saint-Phalle’s work. The perfumes are a bit of a puzzle. They are confidently strong and contemporary in a Tom Ford sort of way. The first impression is rich and powerful, but these largely synthetic compositions do not age well on skin. Their complexity and richness decrease linearly as the fragrance evaporates, and they evolve like artichokes, peeling off one leaf after another until you’re stuck with unpalatable grey wool at the core. I feel UNN would be better advised to forgo some of the raw power for more natural compositions, especially in the drydown.

Estrella de la Mañana is the closest you’re going to get today to the wonderful and discontinued Bulgari Black, nice and smoky-rubbery but with less 1950s Je Reviens salicylates. Jardins de Misfah, named for a mountain village in Oman, has a good, minty dried-fruit accord that begs for slightly more natural complexity. Silver Saffron is a more conventional spicy structure, unfortunately back-lit by an unwelcome woody amber.

Samples kindly supplied by Luckyscent.