As if on cue, Tom Ford just released a flanker to his ‘Ombre Leather’ scent – Ombre Leather Reserve – and my friend Betsy was kind enough to pick up a bottle on sale while on her latest cruise in the Bahamas. (Good thing too, as it wasn’t available anywhere I looked the last time I was in Boston.) It arrived just in time for this Fall of the Cowboy, and the Tom Ford company itself writes that this is a woody leather scent inspired by the high desert of the American West. With elements of juniper and the resinous smokiness of pinyon wood softened by sandalwood, a woody leather is indeed amply descriptive of the first twenty minutes or so – in which notes of cypress also surface, lending the opening a greener aspect than I’d antiquated – and a most welcome one at that. The leather is still the rich, dark star of the show, driving it into almost challenging territory.
That opening has its prickly points, with a few moments of questionable tar and petrol giving the initial impression a darker and more challenging shade than it might deserve, before it dissipates into something sweeter. With ancestry rooted in Ford’s original ‘Tuscan Leather’, and this being a flanker of ‘Ombre Leather’, it isn’t brand new territory for the fragrance line, but it’s different enough to merit another bottle, thanks to the woodier juniper notes and the green accents that lend it life.
It dries down into its loveliest form at about an hour into the journey and stays there for a while – when the sandalwood and violet finally take their place high above the wild, Wild West. The best part of both the Tuscan and Ombre leathers was this exquisite dry-down (in the former’s case a sweet raspberry) and the Reserve’s dry-down is just as beautiful.
It makes for the perfect companion fragrance to the Fall of the Cowboy – and when the universe whispers agreement and alignment in such matters, you know we are on the right track.
