Joyeux, but make it attar: a feel-good fougère that actually feels good

I wore Sultan Pasha Perfumes Joyeux Extrait de Parfum on a dull Tuesday and the air shifted from grayscale to Technicolor. If you think fougère means polite lavender and office-safe musk, brace yourself. This is a barbershop with good posture and a wicked sense of humor, filtered through the dense, oil-slick elegance that Sultan Pasha does when he’s in his element, with the polished architecture Chris Carbonnel is famous for.

What it smells like on skin:

• A bright, almost sparkling lift at the top that feels like bergamot and herbs taking a deep breath.
• A confident lavender heart with a geranium snap, not powdery, not fusty, just clean-lined and toned.
• The fougère spine thickened by what reads as tonka and moss, with a plush, balsamic undercurrent that feels attar-rich rather than synthetically glossy.

The extrait format isn’t a gimmick here. It reads as plush volume, not shouty sillage. Projection is a handshake, not a tackle, and the drydown is lingering velvet that makes shirts and scarves smell like you actually know what you’re doing with your life. On me, it moves from sparkling-green to creamy-woody over six to eight hours, with that soft hay-vanillic hum fougère lovers chase.

If you’ve lived through too many ambroxan fogs and gourmand sugar rushes, Joyeux feels like a reset. It nods to the classical barbershop lineage but avoids cosplay. No shrill citrus, no plasticky aromatics, no mall-cologne swagger. Just optimism, structure, and texture. It is feel-good in the grown-up sense: mood-lifting without acting cute.

The name matters. Joyeux suggests candor over theatrics, and that is exactly how it wears. It is celebratory, not loud. I can see it on a linen shirt in July or a cashmere rollneck in January. If 2025 is the year the fougère stops sucking in its gut and starts breathing, this is the inhale.

Key takeaways:

• Sultan Pasha Perfumes Joyeux Extrait de Parfum: a classic fougère reframed with attar-grade plushness.
• Built by Sultan Pasha and Chris Carbonnel for people who want polish and pleasure in the same bottle.
• If you love barbershop structure but crave depth and tactility, this is your lane.