Somone once called Tabac "Chanel N°5 for men," and rather poetically added that it smelled "divine." Of course, having been a Bolshevik in my former life, my mind immediately jetted off to Eastern Europe, and roamed the black-forested hills of Russia, the mountain towns of Lithuania, the former Czechoslovakia's golden fields of mustard and rape. Wings of Desire, or Der Himmel über Berlin,the famous Franco-German motion picture directed by none other than Düsseldorf's Wim Wenders, also comes to mind. I can attest to the bleakness of life for Soviet-satellite nations only second-hand, having strolled on ankle-thin cement sidewalks between hulking cement behemoths holding upwards of six-hundred families in their colorless bowels. Naturally these are post-communist memories, and I've never been to Germany, but I have witnessed the fatalistic stoicism of a people so accustomed to repression as to expect it despite their hard-won freedoms.
The beauty of the Polish, the Czechs, the Slovaks, is their casual understanding of the universe; the great unknown, as they seem to see it, is where we're all headed, and you might as well toke on a Djarum Black and walk your dog and ignore the impulse to substitute classical music for the din of rush hour traffic. God is another excuse for letting your emotions get away from you, and why bother talking to him through the tears when you can create something, save something, and move someone all by yourself? Eastern Europeans work hard. I mean hard. Harder than any American, possibly harder than the Chinese and Japanese, and to date I've yet to see another people who consider a twelve-hour day "short," or commute four hours a day without a second thought. There's no shortcut in a catch-up culture. Everyone has to pay their dues, and keep paying until they're dead or broke.
Tabac, probably the European equivalent of Old Spice, is what repressed people wore when their leaders were cordoning off their communities with cement walls and barb-wire fences. You might think, having never tried it, that it must smell weak, simple, without resource as a product of those with very limited resources. In fact, it's just the opposite. Tabac smells rich, smooth, complex, and very, very good. Prior to acquiring my little bottle I had no idea what to expect, and hadn't really done much reading on it. I spritzed some on my wrist, and what a surprise! It's a citrus chypre! And it's unisex! The top notes are loaded with aldehydes, bergamot, lemon, lavender, and a big spicy carnation that feels pink and clean and peppery-fresh. A powdery amber sets in later, lending this heady construct some warmth, with hints of sandalwood and rose. An approximation of tobacco is loosely achieved via the thoughtful combination of amber and moss, with just a touch of pine contrasting the sweeter floral notes. The result: divine indeed.
Despite its many virtues, Tabac is not what I consider easy to love. Its citrus is big, its floral notes are very heady, and its woody-mossy underbelly is crudely unapologetic. One could speculate that the construct was calibrated to mask bodily odors, which isn't far-fetched when you consider the days of public bath houses in diesel-fumigated city squares (had I been there, Tuesday and Thursday would have been my preferred "bathing days"). Perhaps a point of comparison would help - Boucheron Pour Homme is more refined, but the same basic storyline of rich citrus and floral notes is there to be had. It certainly sits on the same branch of the olfactory family tree. This review is of Tabac's Eau de Cologne concentration.