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L'Artisan Parfumeur is one of those early niche lines from the seventies that reached peak popularity in the 2000s, and has since seen its cache descend under the tide of overpriced crap that has arisen since. I remember the rampant enthusiasm for L'Artisan fragrances on Basenotes between 2008 and 2013, right when the oud craze fully took hold, and I thought it was an esoteric brand that was only interesting to me because I had no interest in it. Maybe it was all the fawning praise for stuff like Méchant Loup and Dzing!, which were fun to read about, but failed to inspire me. Or perhaps it was that L'Artisan was "niche," but not really that expensive, and I was snobbily rejecting anything priced at less than a hundred dollars an ounce. I found it strange that Jean Laporte had created a brand, only to leave it four years later, and create Maître Parfumeur et Gantier to compete with it. Seems like something a CEO of an automaker in Detroit would do.
He released Mûre et Musc eau de toilette in 1978, and it is one of several L'Artisan works that has survived the decades relatively intact. Touted as a novel accord of blackberry and clean musk, the composition is every bit like a seventies drugstore musk, and is evocative of Jōvan Musk, smelling sharp, soapy, and acrid, which you'd expect from something much cheaper. This pungent bell-bottoms-in-a-bottle is rapidly ensconced in a tart blackberry note, which only smells like actual fruit for fifteen or twenty seconds before devolving into a basic sweetness that hums alongside the sweet muskiness. There's a serious Saturday morning cartoons vibe here. The competing polarities of sweetness form a sort of soft, fuzzy-purple shampoo effect, a touch cozy and kitschy, and easy to like. It's cool, a tad raunchy, and not as transparent as I thought it would be.
I think I could get into Mûre et Musc if it weren't for things like Jōvan Musk and Monsieur Musk, which are infinitely cheaper and more durable. L'Artisan's longevity is middling in the EDT concentration, and I get about four to five hours before it turns into a barely-there whisper. During that mediocre duration, it's already pretty weak and unimposing, and smells like it would be hard to apply too much. More importantly, it smells like something I can get for far less money, which is annoying at these price points: $145 for 100 ml, which isn't exactly mind-blowing money, but enough to want more. Weirdly, Afnan's Supremacy in Heaven smells more complex and expensive, and costs $115 less. I guess you could argue that Mûre et Musc preceded many of the designer musks of the eighties, and thus its pedestrian quality is a feature and not a bug, but I still want my moolah back.