TEA FOR TWO BY L'ARTISAN PARFUMEUR (2000)

Get a job!

I had some expectations about this, as I really love tea, but as for tobacco (which I love, too), this is just another disappointment. I may be wrong or used to the wrong kind of teas, but I really don’t see how one could buy this cheap, synthetic, subtly (but I admit, pleasantly) zesty musky-spicy blend with a massive synthetic tobacco base for a “lapsang blend”. Or a tea blend of any kind, unless you reference tea is in your office’s vending machine. It isn’t dramatically bad, but it’s just a fairly cheap, extremely linear and massively uninspired sort of sweetish mish-mash between Gucci pour Homme II, Tobacco Vanille and Bvlgari Black and/or Céline pour Homme, in a clumsy attempt to rip-off Annick Menardo’s style and fondness for dry, smoky, elusively Oriental “weightless” textures (not the first time I notice this “talent” of the Queen of hipster parfumistas – Olivia Giacobetti). Again, just to be clear, it smells decent, but it’s really a depressing department store kind of decent. If you want a sweet tobacco, then stick to the plethora of cheap clones of Tobacco Vanille; if you want some versatile masculine tea-infused scent, the immensely richer, more compelling and more quality Gucci pour Homme II is there for you, and it’s still the nicest “tea-inspired” scent I’ve ever tried.

You know that joke: “when I went to parties and then people said things like «there was two or three people», I always was «or three»” - that’s Tea for Two. A flat bit of this, a bit of that, mediocrely diluted with zero inspiration and zero creativity. Last but not least, with a crap longevity. Meh.

5/10