Oeillet Bengale – spicy and smoky and stunning

Photo: perfumenich

A few years ago, I found a bottle of L’Artisan’s Oeillet Sauvage, ‘wild carnation’ in English, in a small store in Geneva. I hadn’t had much experience with carnation-centric scents back then, so this wasn’t a fragrance I was looking for. Instead, it was a fragrance that found me. The first time I tried it on my skin, I fell in love with it, and that’s how I tumbled down the carnation rabbit hole.

Carnations have a floral, spicy, clove-like scent that’s warm, beguiling, and elegant. But for perfume, the smell emitted by the flowers cannot be extracted naturally. Their scent must be recreated by combining natural and synthetic molecules. This provides perfumers with considerable scope for creativity in fragrances centred on carnations That’s how I discovered Oeillet Bengale by Aedes de Venustas.

Oeillet Bengale was created by Rodrigo Flores-Roux in 2014 for American niche line and fragrance store, Aedes de Venustas. The idea for the fragrance came from botanist and floral painter Pierre Joseph Redouté’s 1824 book ‘Les Roses’. While leafing through the book, Aedes de Venustas owners Karl Bradl and Robert Gerstner were taken by a botanical print of Bengale Oeillet. ‘Oeillet’ means carnation in English, but Bengale Oeillet is actually a variety of China rose, bred by Redouté. With its dark, almost black colour, globular shape and cluster-flowers, it resembles a carnation more than a rose. It was the shape-shifting nature of the plant that inspired the fragrance, not its scent, hence the transposition of the plant's name to create the perfume's name: Oeillet Bengale.

Oeillet Bengale opens with a bracing blend of tart, bitter, and nose-tingling bergamot and spicy white pepper. It blooms languorously on my skin, taking its time before allowing a note of rose to unfurl slowly. A note of sharp, fiery black pepper ignites a slew of fragrant spices - the ‘Bengal’ in the name. Cinnamon and cardamom are warm and slightly sweet, saffron is spicy and leathery, turmeric is warm and earthy, clove is peppery, and to my nose, there’s a metallic facet. The clove has a smoky aspect that connects warm, smoky-sweet balsamic tolu balsam. The smokiness does a slow burn as tolu’s vanilla undertone links notes of spicy, ambery, and resinous labdanum. Ylang-ylang is sweet, floral and fruity. It bolsters the rose and extends the carnation effect before warm, resinous benzoin appears; its sweet vanilla aspect bonds with a note of creamy, comforting vanilla that’s positively aphrodisiacal.

Oeillet Bengale dries down to a spicy, smoky, sensual stunner that starts hot and fiery and then smoulders on my skin for hours. It’s a big fragrance, but not as dark or heavy as it sounds.

For a long time, carnation had a reputation as being old-ladyish, had fallen out of fashion with perfumers. But with Oeillet Bengale, Rodrigo Flores-Roux has found a way to make this old girl hot again.

Check out Oellet Bengale in our Shop.