Robert Piguet- Calypso

I was browsing vintage fashion illustration done for Robert Piguet couture house in the 1930s and 40s and wished I could see the clothes and smell more of the iconic perfumes in their original form (I have some vintage Bandit). Somehow, I doubt the 2010 Piguet's  reissue of Calypso is what it used to be.

To be fair, Calypso smells better in the bottle and on a test strip than on my skin, so perhaps there's a lot of skin chemistry at play here. Overall, this Piguet perfume (re-orchestrated or whatever you wish to call it by the otherwise talented  Aurelien Guichard) is the feminine equivalent of the bland Cravache. Calypso is mostly floral and vaguely citrusy, and despite the official promise of an ambery dry-down (the notes listed below look quite delicious), my nose is mostly missing any of the base notes here. Suede? I wish. Calypso lacks something to make it interesting or at least semi-memorable . It's kind of pleasant but develops like a cheap body spray, and is mostly gone without leaving a trace a couple of hours later.

Octavian Coifan, who's equally unimpressed with Calypso, speaks about the structure and materials used. I might be anosmic to the musk used here and I already know that certain ambroxan compositions also barely translate for my nose, so maybe I'm simply not smelling the full picture. However, based on Octavian's review, I'm not missing much.

Notes (via Fragrantica)-
Top notes: mandarin and geranium. Heart: Bulgarian rose, orris root and rose centifolia. Base: patchouli, amber and suede.

Calypso by Robert Piguet ($85, 1.7 oz) is available from Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman and Henri Bendel.

Robert Piguet 1947 fashion illustration by Roger Descombes from hprints.com.