Givenchy Pi: A Return to the Warm Side of Infinity

Givenchy Pi was on a low shelf in the perfumery I usually go to. I’d worn it a lot when it came out, and somewhere along the way it had slipped out of my collection. I still couldn’t tell you exactly what made me reach for it that day. I’d gone into a shop where there was plenty I could smell for the first time and came home with a full bottle of something I used to wear in the nineties. My nose seems to have its own ideas about keeping up with new releases.

What I wanted from that first wear became clearer once I’d sprayed it. I wanted to know if Givenchy Pi still had the particular kind of sweetness I remembered, and if I’d still enjoy wearing it with everything else I’ve smelled in the intervening years. The first answer came quite quickly. The second turned out to involve a detour through two other bottles I still own, an astronaut and a note with a name straight out of a science-fiction film.

What Givenchy Pi smells like to me now

What surprised me most was how fresh Givenchy Pi felt alongside all that sweetness. I’d carried around a memory of the warm part, which is perhaps the easiest bit to retain after so many years. On skin, the aromatic side was much more apparent than I’d expected. I kept noticing it whenever I went back for another sniff. There’s something lively about that combination, even when the overall impression is soft.

The first fragrance it brought to mind was Versace Blue Jeans, another nineties obsession of mine. I wore it a ridiculous amount and still have a bottle. I’d have been hard pressed to predict that Blue Jeans would be my first thought on smelling Pi again. The connection, for me, is the ease with which both can be sweet and fresh at the same time. It also helps explain what I mean when I say Pi smells like its era. There’s a kind of sweetness here that takes me back to perfumes I actually wore, with that aromatic brightness still very much part of the picture.

The second association came from a different place. Guerlain L’Homme Idéal Cool is much later, and the resemblance I picked up was more specific. There’s something about the almond and anise impression I get from Pi that made me think of the Guerlain straight away. I remember that combination in Cool as almost icy. In Givenchy Pi, it feels rounder and warmer. Having both bottles in the collection makes me want to wear them in succession and see how far the resemblance holds. For the moment, it’s an association from the first wear, and one I’m rather pleased my nose made.

I enjoy a sweet perfume, and there’s plenty of sweetness in current releases. What I’d missed about Pi was this particular arrangement of it. Its aromatic side keeps drawing my attention back even when the warmer impression seems to have won me over. With my nose constantly being invited to smell another dessert or another treatment of oud, it’s nice to spend time with a sweet fragrance that sends me off thinking about anise.

Givenchy Pi notes and the mystery of Infinium

The Osmothèque records Givenchy Pi as a 1998 eau de toilette by Alberto Morillas. Givenchy’s current note list is short. It gives mandarin and pine needle at the top, Infinium in the heart, and ironwood and benzoin crystals at the base. The house calls it a woody amber. I can see the logic in that description after wearing it, especially in the contrast between the fresh, aromatic quality and the soft warmth. The almond and anise are my own associations from this bottle.

I got as far as Infinium and stopped. Mandarin I can picture. Pine needles I can almost smell just by thinking about them. Infinium sounds like something the astronaut in the advert was sent to collect and warned on no account to bring back to Earth.

An older Givenchy catalogue gives Infinium a role in helping the composition radiate and persist. A historical brand description reproduced by Basenotes emphasises freshness and balance. There’s also a secondary account that links it to barley. Its precise makeup and standalone scent profile remain uncertain, and the barley reference is the sort of thing I’d want better documentation for before treating it as an answer. The most interesting detail, to me, is that freshness was part of the way Givenchy talked about Pi. It’s the side of the fragrance I’d mostly forgotten and the side that kept getting my attention on this wear.

When Givenchy sent a warm perfume into space

In the vintage print ad I found on eBay, a man looks up through the visor of a spacesuit. You see his face, the gleam of the metal and the tiny microphone near his mouth. Next to him, the bottle catches the light against a black background. The French copy promises to go un peu plus loin que l’infini. A little further than infinity. Givenchy had apparently decided infinity was a reasonable place to start negotiating.

What I find so good about that image now is how much of it is lit in gold. There’s a great deal of cold hardware in the frame, and the light on the astronaut’s face has the same warmth as the glass. That’s an unexpectedly good visual match for the perfume I’ve just worn. My first thought when I see an astronaut selling an eau de toilette is that I’m about to smell something metallic or very clean. Pi gives me a fresh edge and a surprising amount of softness. The ad makes more sense to me once I look at the light as much as the spacesuit. A Spanish-language version of the same astronaut concept appeared in the Uruguayan magazine Posdata in July 1999. 

There’s a pleasing period detail in what happened to the idea next. A decade later, Givenchy introduced Pi Neo, with The Matrix as a reference point. The exploration story had moved from space towards a world that could be entered virtually. The pyramid-like bottle and arched spray mechanism still gave it a family resemblance. I like that you can see two different ideas of the future in the same fragrance family, about ten years apart. The astronaut is the one I keep coming back to. 

The bottle I understand a little better in the advert

Put Serge Mansau’s flacon next to the campaign and that curved piece of gold hardware starts to look like a miniature version of the helmet. The glass is broad at the base, narrow at the shoulders and rough in places where you’d expect it to be smooth. In the ad, every one of those decisions gives the light somewhere to catch. On the desk in front of me, I still find the whole thing a bit awkward. I can see the idea and remain perfectly unmoved by the object.

Pi won the men’s FiFi award in France in 1999, so I suspect it can live with my opinion. Of the two things I photographed after bringing it home, I actually prefer the white carton with the big gold π. That single mark has all the confidence of the campaign, with about a tenth of the hardware. I’ve written before about how often the bottle is what gets me interested in a fragrance. Here I got as far as paying for a full size while still trying to decide whether I liked looking at it.

The original EDT, the other Pi and what memory can tell me

The Pi I wore in the nineties was an eau de toilette, and in my memory it was a monster. That’s part of the reason I find concentration labels so interesting. Three letters on a box give you a category. How present the perfume actually feels when you wear it is something you find out with the bottle in front of you. My old Pi felt enormous to me, and I’m relying on a memory nearly three decades old for that judgment. My guide to perfume concentrations

One detail I’d forgotten altogether is that Givenchy also offered Pi as an eau de parfum at the time. Basenotes cites then-marketing director Juliette Rapinat-Freudiger describing that version as woodier, with more vetiver, alongside the higher concentration. I find that more interesting than the simple idea of a stronger Pi. Even within the original launch, there was room to change the emphasis. The bottle I’ve bought now is the eau de toilette, and that’s the one I wanted back. 

The first wear of this bottle felt different from what I’d built up in my head. That’s the comparison I can make today. The older bottle belongs to memory, and the new one has had a single wear. It’ll be interesting to see how present it feels after several wears, once I’ve stopped spending half the time trying to place what it reminds me of.

For now, the most useful verdict I have is that I want to put it on again. I’m glad the freshness caught me by surprise, because it gives me something to pay attention to on the next wear. I’m also glad there was a bottle left on that low shelf. I went in with the whole shop ahead of me and apparently only needed to look down.

Some perfumes send me looking for an old advert. Others send me back to a bottle I haven’t worn in years. Explore Fragrance Focus