Au Coeur du Desert

If Andy Tauer's masterpiece L’Air du Desert Marocain evokes the open spaces of a boundless desert sky racing above our heads, then Au Coeur du Desert, based on the original cult classic, is its heart - a quietly beating center of gravity bound to the earth. Although it shares with its progenitor the same dry crackle of cedar and resin, Au Coeur is an altogether more intimate affair, with a melting softness that envelops rather than exalts.

Au Coeur du Desert is a luxurious extrait that uses higher concentrations of the keynote ingredients that gave the original L’Air its soul: coriander, cumin, patchouli, cedar, ambergris, and resin. To our noses, Au Coeur has a smoother quality of patchouli, warmer woods, and a higher dose of ambergris, its salted golden warmth throwing all the other notes into stark relief. In terms of texture, Au Coeur is dense silk to L’Air’s smoke.

Those who love L’Air du Desert Marocain will be relieved to find clear echoes in Au Coeur, but those who found the original too dramatic will be delighted to find a version built on a more human scale. The DNA is intact, but its light is more the hazy glow of dusk rather than the glare of the midday sun, while still remaining unmistakably, wonderfully, quintessentially Andy Tauer.