The above statement quotes the text imprinted on the inner side of the paper band surrounding the bottle for Cigarillo. It's translated into six other languages, Creed style, and oh yeah, the rest of the packaging for this strange little fragrance is extraordinarily beautiful, at least by Rémy Latour standards.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so I offer the above photo as a visual description of the outside of the box. I didn't take a picture of the back of the box, but there isn't much to see. There's just a small white sticker with a super short ingredients list and a barcode. Below is a photo of what you see when you open the box.
And here is a photo of the side of the bottle, which is sealed with a sticker that matches the one on the outside of the package.
And here is the bottle itself, heavy glass moulded into the shape of cigarillos, the trademark Rémy Latour style. It's really well made, with "Eau de Toilette" and "Cigarillo" embossed on the bottom (not shown).
Cigarillo was released in 1996 alongside Cigar, and that's all I know about it. I guess it was intended to be a promotional product. It's been discontinued, and I seriously doubt there are more than a hundred bottles in existence today. Packages like this aren't made on a large scale. There is absolutely no information about it on the internet, aside from one rather uninformed "review" on an otherwise bare basenotes page.
I can't say I'm very familiar with Rémy Latour's fragrances, but this is a cool place to start. I happened across it on the discount shelf of a local shop for a very good price. The place makes me laugh because its priorities are plainly askew - its owner prices weird trash like Cathy Carden's Space at $50, but asks about half as much for a more extravagant item like this. Go figure.
Anyway, on to the scent: Cigarillo is a misleading name for this EDT. Its composition isn't really about tobacco, although it does have a teeny tobacco note. More prominent in the pyramid are dried fruit notes, and musky, nondescript aromatics, with smooth wood tones, mainly cedar. Conspicuously absent from the formula are any and all floral notes, as I detect nary a single petal in the entire evolution of this scent, on both skin and fabric.
I certainly wouldn't say this fragrance is sweet. Its only edible section resides at the top, which smells of a dessicated, prune-like, ambiguously "perfumey" fruit. Perhaps it's a musky citrus combed into the sugary rind of dehydrated pineapple? Hard to say, as there's no butyric element, but whatever it is, it borders on candy without crossing the line. These qualities are offset by a transparent bay note. It's a strange accord, unlike anything I've smelled before, and it lasts about fifteen minutes. Its dusky delectables draw me in; the grizzle of semi-animalic musks and sour bay hold me there.
Eventually this unique top segues into a ghost of treated snuff, wedded to a very dusty cedar and musk base. The "tobacco" effect is representative of an artificial flavoring, rather than actual tobacco leaf. Fragrances like Cigarillo and Vermeil for Men, which Latour's scent resembles for roughly an hour or so, are priced to mimic the synthetic aromatics of processed tobacco, not the burly radiance of the real stuff. With that in mind, the perfumer hit a homerun. Cigarillo smells like a cheap cigarillo. As a former cigar smoker, I can attest to this firsthand.
This all eventually becomes a relatively simple cedar fragrance. It isn't pencil shaving cedar, or woody amber. It's just a sooty cigar box smell. There's something "niche" about it. They were going for a concept: a perfume that smells of cheap tobacco aromatics at the start, with a little steer sweat baked into the middle, all resting in an Old World wooden container. And it actually comes in that very same container. Well done, Latour. Well done.
The packaging was obviously handmade, probably by a single craftsman, or maybe a very small team. The lettering on the box is a dead giveaway. When I caught sight of this fragrance, it resurrected dormant creative juices from my graphic design days.
I'm friends with a retired designer who was commissioned, thirty some-odd years ago, by Anheuser-Busch. They needed him to create a promotional line of wooden crates, to be filled with beer bottles and sold at company events. Each crate was constructed with plywood. Each had the company logo etched into it. All were hand packed with straw.
The order was overwhelmingly enormous for one person to manage, at ten thousand units. At the time, it wasn't cost effective to outsource, nor practical to fill within the U.S., but that didn't stop him from trying.
The same happened with Cigarillo. Someone at corporate headquarters was riding high on a Clintonian dotcom bubble, and decided to throw a little surplus pocket change at some small time commercial artist, either in Europe or North America. Three thousand man hours and several gallons of blood, sweat, and tears later, this magnificent faux cigar box with its colorful stickers and waxed parchment rolled off a basement assembly line and was shipped to Latour. Now, twenty years later, I'm enjoying it. Ain't life grand?