Au Coeur du Désert is another scent that creates a space to inhabit–one with a thousand yard stare, huge skies with high thin clouds, and air that crackles clean.

One of the many things I love about deserts is the way that details come into focus. You get to retune your senses, scaling perspective up and down from the vast expanses to the smallest creature tracks, the skittering, rustling sound of sand blown over sand, the scratching circle of a wind-turned stalk. And you want to lie under those skies and feel tiny, as you hurtle through space.

Well, I do.

I get carried away with this stuff when no one is around. Andy Tauer manages to distill this into a small blue bottle. (Or in this case, a second sample that I’ll soon upgrade to one of those distinctive, pleasing to the hand bottles*.)

It seems that most people find this fragrance warmer and sweeter than the original and rightly revered L’Air du Désert Marocain. For me, however, it’s the other way around.

Au Coeur du Désert has more breathing space, bigger skies, and a clearer drier light. It’s sun-warmed but not radiating heat, and there’s still a cold mineral edge underfoot, and everything is soft.

I remember waking up under the first light in Wadi Rum, to the faint smells of camel-chewed acacia, the now-cold fire ashes, a tang of turpentine from a terebinth tree, body warmth swaddled in a heavy blanket, and wildflowers blooming from the rare rainstorm two nights before.

ACdD is a different desert, with different scents on the breeze, but the sense of focus and the promise of adventure is the same. So I can’t resist sharing the second picture, which I took of @snarlish early one long ago winter morning on the edge of the Sahara in Morocco. Because Au Coeur du Desert lets me be there again. Right there.

* if you’re in the UK, you are out of luck unless you can find a second hand bottle; Tauer doesn’t ship here.

first posted 6 April 2019