Three Best Woody Perfumes for Women and Men

If you're in  the mood for something a bit different from the fruity florals that dominate the perfume counters these days, a little exploration along the woody section of the fragrance wheel might provide just the change you're looking for.

Woody scents typically feature aromatic woods like cedar, sandalwood, pine and rosewood. Woody notes often combine well with the rich, spicy accords that are found in oriental perfumes, but perfumes that focus on the woody element are rarely as over the top as some orientals can be. The three woody perfumes I'm looking at here are quiet and even restrained in character, but they're also elegant and distinctive and very far from dull.

Serge Lutens is a Paris-based niche perfume house with an excellent reputation among many perfume-lovers for creating complex and unusual perfumes. You can read more about Serge Lutens in my hub about some of his spicy perfumes.

Fille en Aiguilles translates literally as "girl out of needles". It's a play on words, since "aiguilles" also refers to stiletto heels in French, but it's also a more literal reference to needles - the pine needle note that opens and sustains this distinctive perfume.

The pine note in Fille en Aiguilles is about as far as it's possible to get from the sharp, synthetic pine found in household cleaners. What we have here is the smell of a pine tree in the near distance, of pine needles on the forest floor. It's a soft, gentle sort of scent - and then the incense note joins it and starts to make things interesting. The typical Lutens spicy stewed fruits accord adds to the warm buzz provided by the incense, but its presence is very muted compared to the way in which it's used in many other perfumes from this line. The relationship between the pine and the incense is at the heart of Fille en Aiguilles. This is as much an incense perfume as it is a woody perfume.

Fille en Aiguilles is beautifully balanced, and also just beautiful. It stays close to the skin but lasting time is excellent.

Diptyque was established in the early 1960s. The business initially focused on designing and marketing cotton fabrics, but they soon became better known for their perfumed candles. Diptyque has been producing personal fragrances as well since the late 1960s.

Tam Dao includes notes of rosewood, cypress, ambergris, and sandalwood. It's very much a wood-dominated scent, so perhaps it's no surprise that it's also the softest and quietest of these three perfumes. It's also elegant and thoughtful and an all-round great perfume for days when you're in the mood for something smooth and soothing. It's not complicated in the sense that some perfumes are. There is no huge long list of weird combinations of notes that make your head spin trying to keep up with everything that's going on. But the near perfect simplicity of Tam Dao is very far from simple. Making the complex appear easy and effortless is a work of genius, in any field.

Tam Dao is an eau de toilette. Lasting time is okay, but no more than that.

L'Artisan Parfumeur is a Paris-based niche perfume house established in the late 1970s. Since then, it has built a reputation for creating distinctive, high quality perfumes.

Launched in 2003, Bois Farine was the first perfume created for L'Artisan's travel series. Perfumer Jean Claude Ellena was inspired to create Bois Farine after a visit to the Reunion Islands. There, he encountered Ruizia Cordata, a rare and fragrant white tree native to the islands.

Ruizia Cordata has small red flowers that smell like flour, and there is a definite flour-like note to Bois Farine. It is easily the most gourmand of these three perfumes. There's a sweet, creamy nuttiness to it that does put me in mind of fresh-baked pastries. But Bois Farine is still very woody, even though the woodiness here is not quite as distinct as the woody notes in both Fille en Aiguilles and Tam Dao. The cedar becomes more prominent at the dry down progresses, while the sandalwood is a constant presence in the creamy aspect of the central gourmand aroma. After an hour or two on the skin, Bois Farine becomes less sweetly gourmand and more obviously a woody perfume.

Notes include: fennel seed, iris, benzoin, sandalwood, cedar, and gaiac wood. Like Tam Dao, Bois Farine is an eau de toilette but lasting time is still pretty good.