This is actually a very sexy scent - very ripe fruit cocktail - not sickly sweet but concocted to be devoured! men seem to love the smell. i feel ravishing wearing it, it is only to be worn occasionally - not every day for me. sexy it is!

I got a sample of this fragrance at Barney's along with another Byredo scent. This scent is so completely gross especially when you add heat. It reminds me of the scent of rotting fruit left out in the sun.

Notes: bergamot, black currant, cardamom, fig, red apple, tiare flower, cedar, praline and peach blossom.

This fragrance opens with a light fig note enhanced by bergamot. The fig's milky-green aroma mixes very well the tangy aroma of the citrus. As the two notes bloom on my skin, they blend until they are barley indistinguishable. This is when the black currant emerges: it reveals itself as a sugary, initially indistinct fruitiness, adding sweetness and depth to the fruit accord. I see now a whirlwind of fruit: their best qualities combined into a fresh summer scent that is very pleasant to wear. Unfortunately the accord is not meant to last long, soon the bergamot burns out and the intense tanginess diminishes. Next the berries burn out and the rich sweetness vanishes. All there remains is the most persistent of the three fruits: the fig adorned by what is left of the more volatile notes. The final mix of fig, cedar, citrus remnants and indistinct fruits reminds me of Hermes' Un Jardin en Mediterranee, only with more fruit and less (kitchen) herbs. Sadly this Byredo offering also lacks persistence, after barely four hours it is gone.

Disclaimer: I associate fruity perfumes with women who sport French pedicures and flip-flops as they sip on cheap drinks with umbrellas on evenings that will likely end in drunken laughter and lewd cursing in empty parking lots. Somehow I doubt whether any woman really enjoys smelling like a Jolly Rancher in public, but I suspect these scents get spritzed on because women think that men enjoy them.


That being said, Byredo's Pulp is different. Yes it is sugary sweet, and yes there is fruit (I smell black currants, melon and strawberries,) and sure it reminds me at some points of the hard candy that dentists warn you against. But it is not insipid or overwhelmingly girly – it is more like a picnic in the park with a basket of fresh fruit than a cocktail named after an island. The middle notes occasionally dip into the fresh and green scent of freshly-cut flower stems, which is a welcome escape from the sweetness and keeps the fragrance from being too linear. On me, the lasting power is about five hours, and it's really closer to 3.5 lippies than 3.


I suspect the quality ingredients allow this to proudly be what it is - a sweet, fruity perfume - but also allow the middle notes to go on for several hours where most other fruity scents fizzle out into a synthetic mess. This is well-blended but you still get whiffs of distinct blackcurrant or green stem that gives it a more natural and genuine character than most of its ilk.


Fruity perfumes are not really my taste, but I might need a decant of this for the summer days when I'm feeling carefree and more in the mood for a romantic comedy than a thick novel.

I wavered between 4 and 5 on this one but ultimately decided it deserves a 5 if for no other reason than it's a very rare citrus that makes me want to make a full purchase. And even with a $200 price tag I want Pulp.
This is definitely a fruity scent, almost puckery. It starts off with a blast, and though I would normally be put off by it; something makes me love this perfume. I don't see rhubarb listed as a note, but I could swear it's there. After about the 20 minute mark I detect the tiare and praline, which calms the scent. There's very little sillage with this one after it settles into the skin, and I don't mind.
Top: Bergamot, cardamom, blackcurrant
Heart: Fig, red apple, tiare
Base: Cedar wood, praline, peach flower

If you are looking for a replacement for the amazing sour-fruit nirvana that was the late Jus by Fresh, look no further. I was so transported by Pulp that I shelled out big bucks for the bottle within minutes of my first spray. My first impression is a blast of lemons, grapefruits, Granny Smith apples,and (maybe) unsweetened cranberries, served on a bed of leafy green notes. It settles down into a more straightforward berry/fig fruity scent after a while, but GAWD those first 20 minutes are phenomenal: the most puckeringly unsweet fruity scent since...well, since Jus, actually. Reminds me of a amplified sour version of Diptique's L'Ombre dans L'eau, heavy on fruit, light on greenery.

How odd. I really don't get a lot of fruit in this one. I get a hint of unripe berries,but overall it's the scent of green tomato leaves in hot summer sun. Hot, green, almost spicy, but no fruit to really speak of. It's very interesting and really does put me in a garden in summer at noon. Not true to advertising for me, though

NoI enjoy this fragrance. It opens with a blast of grapefruit, a little tart lemon, some peach, a few raspberries, some juicy red and green apple, and all the fruit smells are realistic, not perfumey. It is quite nice! I'm not a big fan of the grapefruity opening, and by no stretch of the imagination do I get the girly sweetness of more typical 'fruity' scents, nor the animalic or skank notes of FM or SL fragrances. This is a ripe, nice fruit smell, not too sweet.
I wish I could say something more magnificent about it, but it is VERY light on me, not enough sillage. The mid-notes are all apple. No hint of woods or base or anything else, just fruit! This disappeared completely in less than an hour on me, which is very unusual for my skin. -1 lippie for that.. unfortunately I think a fruit smoothie spilled on my arm would probably last longer.

I have been longing for this perfume for months, and here I am in Egypt, unable to find it. I first smelled it in a small shop in Antwerp. It smelled great on a strip, so I spritzed myself. I was put off at first, but by the time we got in the car and were halfway to our destination, I was in love. Unfortunately, my only day in Brussels was a Sunday and it was impossible to find. This was in November, and I have been longing, longing for it ever since. The silage was fantastic on me, and I happily smelled my wrist all evening. My niece was coming for a visit from Paris, so I asked her to pick it up from a shop there. She went in the pouring rain, and they were out of stock. Woe is me. I want it and gotta have it, and as you can plainly see, I am obsessed. The scent was juicy but not too sweet and it had depth and layers that exploded on my skin one by one. I guess this will have to wait until July when I will be back in Europe and the US.

Byredo Pulp is a fragrant freak, a scent that is so many things at once that it can only be confounding. Is it fig? Grapefruit? Passionfruit? Apple? Or something else?



The only thing certain about Pulp is that it is big. Enormous, in fact, in the way the each of its main notes is magnified to equal values and perhaps in these heavily armed states to do battle with one another. Nothing is subtle about Pulp. It's fruit as Surrealism, fruit as creature, fruit as so life-like that it transcends life in its crude and sadomasochistic exercise in compositional impasto. This is a gallery, not a pyramid: Slab after slab of fruit is layered upon the last. Nothing gives way. Add to this fleshiness (both botanic and human) and a big middle finger to the likes of Be Delicious. Wear it and feel like an art critic.



I've seen enough reviews of Pulp to realize that it smells different on and to everyone who tries it. On me, Pulp is fig, but it is also passionfruit, grapefruit, and apple. The fig is the woody and bark-like type; both of these qualities are enhanced by a base cedar. No contrast exists among the fruit notes and they exist equally in sour, almost rotten, and fermented states. This latter effect leads to at least the fig becoming whisky-like.



Pulp opens strong and rotten. A small bag that contained my samples smelled off-puttingly of decaying passionfruit, a note that leans towards the animalic. Upon application, the scent seemed shocked by an electric current of bergamot and torn open by a fig leaf that contributed a bitter grassiness.



Pulp is impassioned. Pulp is violent.



The opening doesn't prepare you for the onslaught that comes next: Fumes of alcohol rush off the center above a sudden flash of tiare-coconut. Each of the main fruit notes then explodes in turn and re-explodes, until you are not sure just what you are smelling. Perhaps part of the issue with Pulp is that it is hard to understand; to me it is a fantasy fragrance and not one meant to be taken literally as a perfume even as its rendering of the notes is as literal as is possible. I'd call it a dreamscape fragrance, in which a churning mash of fruit takes on a symbolic life of its own, however you interpret it.



Drydown is mildly perfume-y and contains--or perhaps I am dreaming--something like apricot kernel. This is where the cardamom note appears on me, probably because the fruit mash that precedes its appearance is so strong as to temporarily occlude it. I may even get the barest hint of coffee flower, but I'd not be surprised if this too were pure hallucination.



Lasting power wasn't tremendous. The fig was diminished by the drydown and the scent reduced to a peachy/powdery floral with only the barest hint of what had gone before. In this more conventional stage, Pulp is what is called "wearable," but it seems to me to be a cop-out or an apologia for what went before.



Pulp is enigmatic and bizarre. Don't come looking for tonal variations here. Expect to be stunned and maybe appalled. Pulp is looking for a visceral reaction and it gets one. continued >>