The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Jousset Parfums leaned fully into what makes the house tick with Gourmand Bakhoor Crème de la Crème: dessert translated into scent, no apology. The Crème de la Crème edition takes the original Gourmand Bakhoor concept and pushes it richer, layering peanut butter and chocolate over the brand's signature incense-and-pastry architecture. Each composition reads as a specific dessert moment, and this one delivers exactly that. Warm pastry rises first, then smoke curling up from the bakhoor, with a thick ribbon of caramel tying the whole thing together like the final glaze on a finished cake. The bakery accord stays plush and bready throughout, never collapsing into something merely sugary, while the resinous incense keeps it tethered to something older and more solemn.
What makes this composition interesting is the collision of registers. Peanut butter and chocolate read as pure American comfort food, almost nostalgic. Bakhoor smoke reads as Arabian ritual, resinous and ancient. Pastry and caramel sit between them, playing translator. The result isn't fusion for its own sake. It's a dessert plate set down next to burning incense, and the smoke decides to stay for the whole meal. Jousset's house philosophy rejects the notion that gourmand notes must be subtle, and Crème de la Crème is a working example of that stance: dense, unapologetic, and built to be noticed.
The evolution
The opening arrives loud. Not aggressive, but unmissable: chocolate and peanut butter land together like a confectioner's first move, sweet and coating the air around you with something almost chewable. Within a short while the pastry accord surfaces, bready and warm, and caramel slides underneath everything like a thick syrup holding the structure together. This is where it sits for a long stretch, dense and golden, the dominant register for most of the wear, with the peanut butter reading more as roasted nut than as anything novelty-sweet, and the chocolate staying closer to dark cocoa than milk. Eventually the smoke begins to surface. Not ash, not campfire, but bakhoor: resinous, slightly dry, threaded through the vanilla like a memory of incense that never quite left the room.
Cultural impact
Within Jousset's catalog, Gourmand Bakhoor Crème de la Crème sits as the bolder sibling to the original Gourmand Bakhoor, a richer take on the same dessert-and-incense idea. It rewards the wearer who treats indulgence as self-knowledge, sweet on their own terms, never as performance. The fragrance reads as edible without crossing into novelty, which keeps it in step with other modern gourmands rather than novelty dessert flankers.
