Beauty Care: Tom Ford Ebene Fume Perfume Review

Tom Ford Ebene Fume Eau de Parfum is all about drier, lightly creamy woods with bits of spice, whether from spiced, smoky incense or sweeter resins. It started out more fiery, peppery, and green before shifting into smoky, drier woods with a hint of leather, and then finally drying down to a sweet, warm woods. The notes are:

top notes: incense, Palo Santo wood, black pepper, violet leaf
heart notes: leather, cade oil, labdanum, papyrus, rose
base notes: resins, ebony tree, Guaiac wood

It opened with peppery, billowing incense over smooth woods; it made me think of the smell of fireplaces burning in the wintertime but less intense and refined–more the concept of campfire in the middle of a forest, because there was was more than just incense smoke but something darker but never to the point where it was burnt or charred.

The woods were noticeably drier after 15 minutes of settling on my skin as the papyrus note emerged. As the incense receded to the background, Ebene Fume became creamy, dry woods and aged leather with a modicum of resinous sweetness. I felt like the sweet, lightly spiced resins added more warmth and smoothed out the composition, though the incense was more of a blown out haze after an hour of wear. It was a more linear journey, which is not a bad thing so long as you enjoy those notes, and it only sweetened and became creamier over the next few hours in the drydown.

Application

For testing, I used two sprays applied to the underside and topside of my wrist area on my left arm. I used an unscented moisturizer prior to applying the scent as this is also my swatching arm (aka, incredibly parched at any given moment) as I found scent did not hold well here otherwise.

Longevity

It lasted for eight hours until it was a skin-scent and about 14 hours before it was quite difficult to detect on my skin. The sillage and projection were moderate with the sillage dropping faster than the projection within four hours of wear.

Personal Thoughts

I enjoyed the fragrance and found it sat well on my skin, was well-blended, and seemed to smell a lot like it sounded like it would (which is always a plus), but I feel like I’ve smelled this before from Tom Ford — a spicier, smokier Santal Blush but surprisingly similar. I prefer it to Santal Blush by degrees, since I enjoy the addition of more spice and smoke.