Fragrantica's entry for Hermessence Violette Volynka lists three notes: Volynka leather, violet, violet leaf. Selfridges prints the leather on top and the violet in the heart and stops there. At £248 to £370 depending on size that looks thin, and it isn't: Jean-Claude Ellena founded the Hermessence line in 2004 on the idea of perfume as haiku, sold only in the house's own boutiques, one raw material pushed forward and everything else in service of it. Christine Nagel succeeded him and released this one in 2022. A three-note pyramid is the house style, not a shortcut.

Volynka is the interesting half of the name. It's Russia leather, yufte, hides tanned with oak and willow bark then cured with birch oil, which is what gives the material its water resistance and its smell. Hermès and its retailers hang the fragrance on the wreck of the Metta Catharina, a Danish brigantine that left St Petersburg in December 1786 bound for Genoa, was driven into Plymouth Sound by a gale and went down with a hold full of the stuff. Divers found the bundles two centuries later, still usable. The story usually arrives with the hides described as reindeer, following Garbett and Skelton's excavation reports, and a Ligatus paper on Russian yufte calls that "a wishful extension" of the leather's "almost mythical reputation" in the West, noting that the lattice finish on the recovered bundles is the one Russian sources associate with cow and bull hide. None of which changes what's in the bottle. It does tell you that the romance around this material was already being polished long before a perfumer got hold of it, which is worth holding onto when the drydown turns out to be quieter than the legend.

The presentation makes the same trade. A plain rectangular flask, the orange box, and then a purple leather collar stitched around the cap, the one loud element, and it's the violet's colour rather than the leather's.

Violets and leather is Germaine Cellier's territory. She staked it out in Jolie Madame for Balmain in 1953, a formula whose note list runs to seventeen: green leaves, violets and leather up front, castoreum and civet doing the work underneath, oakmoss and patchouli holding the floor. Angela at Now Smell This, who set that list out, said the leather lets you know the woman wearing it would kick your keister around the block if you mess with her. Chanel's Cuir de Russie, Ernest Beaux in 1927, is the other pole, and it has already been sanded down once in public: Jacques Polge reorchestrated it in 1983 to play down the leather and push up the iris.

That second fact is the one people skip when they set Volynka against the classics. The Cuir de Russie on sale today isn't the 1927 one either. Vintage and modern Jolie Madame don't smell alike, and Balmain has since discontinued the modern one anyway. The animalics that gave those perfumes their teeth have largely left mainstream perfumery under the same regulatory and commercial squeeze that turned Kouros into a scent people either argue about or can't wear at all. So part of the distance between 1953 and 2022 was never Nagel's to close.

The rest of it was, and she chose not to. Cuir d'Ange, Ellena's 2014 Hermessence, already put a soft floral leather in this exact register, and the most persistent complaint on Fragrantica is that Volynka is a more focused violet stapled to a very similar leather. Persolaise put it accurately inside the house range, less masculine than Equipage, less accessible than Kelly Calèche, less strange than Cuir d'Ange, the leather presented in an "innocent, almost naive frame" while still filling a room with tannery. The Black Narcissus granted it "high aesthetic competence" and then found the later stages "gently nonagenarian and soaped; white-cardiganed."

I should be straight about the limits of that: I'm reading the consensus, not my own wrist, and the two reviewers I trust most here disagree about whether the softness is the point or the problem. What both descriptions have in common is that nothing in the scent pushes back. Cellier's leather is rude. Beaux's is aristocratic and a little cold. Both give you something to argue with, which is why people are still arguing sixty and ninety years on. Volynka gives you a beautifully made violet against a beautifully made suede, and the compliance regime isn't what stopped it being difficult. Ellena's haiku format did, and Nagel worked inside it faithfully.

That produces something genuinely lovely and probably not durable. Jolie Madame had seventeen notes and several of them were unpleasant. This has three and all of them are lovely, which is a harder trick than it sounds and a much easier one to forget.

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