A bright winter’s morning. The bathroom of a stately home.
On the washbasin lies a pristine bar of soap. It is the most perfect soap imaginable; a hard, impenetrable, triple-milled yellow soap; the clean, heart-clearing brightness of bergamot, and the finest essences of neroli married to a light, fresh note of cool, purified vetiver grass planted down, somewhere beneath the surfaces, in its fragrant, pounded centre.
A vetiver, then, of spanking immaculateness and spruceness; a perfect accoutrement to the face-splashing morning ritual: a scent that very reeks, almost, of trust.
Until you smell Signoricci that is, when the artificial, clammed together, and somewhat hysterical brightness of Creed’s Original Vetiver is exposed……
Signoricci, one of the few key masculines from a house that, in its heyday, produced some of the most delicate and exquisite feminine florals ever created, predates Creed’s scent by thirty years and is of a similar soap-cleansed theme; citrus (lemon, verbena, lime), over delicate cologne-steeped vetiver, but in this long regretted perfume the effect is incredibly refined.
I first smelled it at my friend Federico’s apartment in Rome one October afternoon, standing there alone as it was on his wooden bookshelf in his room, and I remember how immediately blown away I was by its deceptively simple beauty; a beautiful conception of masculinity that is almost impossible to imagine now in today’s world of hard-hitting woods, spices and designer-bearded synthetics.
Beginning with perhaps the most piercing, yet simultaneously gentle and perfect citrus top note I know of, the vetiver, cedar and sandalwood heart of this composition is then revealed gently and gradually; an accord of almost heartbreaking cleanliness: a perfection and purity of soul.
Its perfection notwithstanding, if there can be any criticism of Signoricci it is just that: this perfume is possibly too perfect; a saintly, flawlessly scrupled man who seems too good, almost, to be true.
