This smells like the original Aramis. I know it gets compared to a lot of niche and/or more obscure perfumes, and I’m not saying it doesn’t smell like them, I wouldn’t know, I’ve not smelled them, but if it IS like them, then THEY smell a lot like Aramis too. I have loads of experience with Aramis, it was one of my Dad’s two signatures when I was growing up, the other being Obsession For Men. There’s a very good chance it was the first fragrance I ever sprayed myself with because it was just there. I also owned a bottle of my own until last year when the sprayer broke and I just threw it out because it was a modern formulation and I wasn’t that attached to it. 

This one smells a LOT better than that did. It honestly reminds me a lot of the version my Dad used to wear, it’s more full-bodied in the opening before airing out as it hits the mid without losing its bite. I’m sure it doesn’t actually just have three notes like the said own says it does, but this is one of those times I could believe it does, where the bitter grapefruit and medicinally rose are blending together to give it the tang it’s got, with the leather smoothing it out. It smells INCREDIBLE, especially when you factor in the price. It’s a perfume made for actual serious adults. Which probably means o shouldn’t be wearing it but whatever I do what I want. 

This really is one of the best perfumes Zara has ever put out. It might be THE best. If nothing else I’d definitely say that if you have any affection for Aramis, buy this instead. The only negatives I can think of is at £29.99 for the new version in their Exclusive range bottle with the magnetic cap it’s probably MORE EXPENSIVE than Aramis is now, and like a lot of Zara fragrances the sprayer isn’t very good, but take into account I’ve already said the sprayer on my bottle of Aramis one day just randomly STOPPED WORKING, so grade that one on a curve. 

This is the biggest cliche you can write when reviewing this one, but… best budget Vanilla fragrance you can buy. Literally the only real contender it has is Liquid Brun, which is a Althair clone, which APPARENTLY smells a decent bit like Club Black y to begin with. I would also throw Zara’s Immortal Vanilla into the conversation, although that’s marketed exclusively to women so you’ve got to get over that before you buy it, and some people find the Coconut note in that really off-putting, either because it’s too synthetic for them or they find it too sunscreeny, both of which I can’t argue with, if that bother you it bothers you. But yeah, if you tied me to a chair and made me choose, until I get my nose on Liquid Brun I’m picking this one. Best budget Vanilla on the market. 

You have to know you like Vanilla though because that’s pretty much the main thing you’re getting from it. It does take on a slightly salty aspect as it dries down which I think might be the Ambroxan, and I guess the incense makes it a bit lightly smoky, but I don’t get any of the Bergamot, I don’t get any of the florals, I don’t get much of the woods, if they’re there then they’re playing a VERY background supporting role on my skin, for me this is pretty much just a very tasty-smelling Vanilla, so if you want a bit more nuance from a perfume with that note then you probably should look somewhere else at the Cheapie end of the scale. The Immortal Vanilla I already mentioned would honestly be a good place to start. 

Gets compared to Acqua di Parma Colonia a lot, and I can see what people mean on that because, wonders never cease, I actually own a bottle of Colonia, so I’ve compared them, and there ARE a lot of similarities. The Ferrari is a lot brighter because of the nutmeg and ginger though which gives the bergamot a candied kind of feel, and it performs better, which isn’t to say it’s great, it’s just better than the Four Hours Tops I get from the Parma, and also it just generally smells less like a urinal cake than Colonia does. I’m not saying I don’t like that one because I do, it just has the aura of a public toilet about it. 

I can’t believe I just wrote “THE AURA OF A PUBLIC TOILET” in a perfume review. I don’t know who I am anymore. 

I don’t normally talk about the individual ratings I give these things but before I do anything else I feel like I need to this time, because I gave the presentation a three, because I DO think the bottles on these look handsome, and especially this one because the green look is lovely, but this is the second time I’ve bought a FOMO where the cap isn’t worth a damn when you try picking it up by it, and on top of that the paint on it has started coming off IN LITERAL CLUMPS. If you go through my reviews you’ll see I mostly collect on the affordable end of the spectrum but even I’ll say, in some ways you really DO get what you bloody paid for. 

At the risk of sounding really pretentious, when I first sprayed this one, I got a bit emotional. I asked for a 50ml for Christmas years ago, but really I was much too young for it because I treated it with zero respect. I oversprayed it, I wore it out of season, I wore doing everything and anything, and obviously eventually I ran out of it, and then when o asked for it again I found out it was discontinued, which at the time I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW WAS A THING THAT COULD HAPPEN, which made me really sad. Then years later when I realised I was collecting this stuff I decided to look up what it was going for secondhand, saw THOSE prices, and decided I was probably never going to own a bottle of it ever again, which made me even sadder. 

So it goes without saying that when I saw news about FOMO’S upcoming release and how they weren’t even being slightly coy about what they were cloning, I got UNREASONABLY overjoyed, and then when it arrived, like I’ve already said, it hit me in my feels immediately because it smelled exactly how I remembered it and a bunch of good memories came flooding back. If anything it smells A BIT BETTER than I remembered because it’s definitely stronger and more full-bodied than the bottle I had, which makes sense because I got my bottle on the cusp of it going away and it had been reformulated at least once before that. 

I read a review of the original in GQ Magazine back in the day (yes I subscribed to GQ when I was a teenager, don’t look at me like that, nobody here is strictly normal are they?), and the guy writing about it said it smelled like “wet leather driving gloves,” which is a VERY poncy GQ way of describing a perfume, but at the same time I get where he was coming from, because there there’s definitely a damp quality to this, musty in a clean, green way. It’s weird because apparently there’s no leather in it, and I think they’d say if there was because this one’s got something like 33,000 notes listed, but I think it might me the citruses and the florals coming together not accidentally make a bit of a leather accord, especially the grapefruit and the rose of I had to guess. It’s classy but also a bit rugged which I’m drawn to, which is hilarious because if you ask me I’m neither of those things. Wear this one’s time with a suit and colour other than black or grey on a

I saw in a lot of places that this was a more masculine take on the BR540 profile, and like… I guess? It’s not a clone of the Extrait, which as far as I can tell IS supposed to be the more “masculine” version of it, it’s the original with the berry brightness turned right the way up and a big dose of pepper shoved in it. It DOES smell nice, it’s either my favourite or second favourite way to smell like 540 that I own, the number of ways I would describe as being “TOO MANY,” halfway on accident I want to add, I didn’t due my due diligence when I picked up a couple of things, this isn’t Aventus where I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m probably going to be buying “Aventus Plus (Add Note Or Accord Here)” until the day I die. It’s just there’s only so much you can do to butch up a fragrance that’s trying to smell like Cotton Candy, it’s either your vibe or it’s not. 

You can probably tell by looking at my collection and reviews that I’ve put up so far that I have zero issue at all with clones/dupes/whatever, but I do find it a bit heartbreaking that Banana Republic has turned this collection into a bit of a clone line in recent years, because in the realm of affordable department store perfumery they were putting out some absolute blinders, two of them I consider stone cold cheapie masterpieces. This is one of them. 

First time I smelled it I wasn’t really impressed, I thought it was just another bergamot fragrance, and at the time I had a LOT of those, but I saw it out one day for an absolute steal, something like twenty quid, so I just grabbed it because at that price why not, and the more I wore it the more I realised I loved it. In the opening the tea note gives it this almost minty fresh blast, then the bergamot and Mandarin orange slowly creep in, mixing with the green notes to produce something, will, citrusy and green, not to sound stupid. The woods are there to support it in the far drydown so it’s got a solid foundation but like, grassy citrus tea, that’s mostly what I get, and it’s very classy yet casual. On a blistering hot day in smart shorts and a nice short-sleeve shirt this is properly the business. 

It took me far too long to realise the bottles for this line are supposed to look a bit like belts. To be fair to myself going with that because you’re building the entire rage around leather IS a bit of a stretch, but… still. 

“Spicy Leather” is a good name for it because it really is a lovely spicy yet airy bit of perfume. It doesn’t punch you in the face with the spice at any point, but obviously when you first spray it, it’s showing off a bit to try and justify the name, but it’s the drydown for me, the nutmeg and patchouli really shine. I also want to bring up because I never see it talked about, I love the lemon up top, I think that mixing with the black pepper are why this works in most seasons except MAYBE ultra hot Summer days, but I’m a sucker for lemon perfumes. Wears very well in Smart Casual settings and dress, and I think it’s good to use on a date, again maybe not one that involves A SUIT or something, but in a smart shirt and nice pair of jeans? Yeah, it’s perfect, grown-up but also fun and not too stuffy. 

This is seen as the Crown Jewel in Hugo Boss’ major comeback as a designer men’s fragrance house, which is now about six or seven perfumes deep depending on if you include the last couple of the The Scent flankers and whether or not you liked Bottled Parfum (I didn’t, I thought it smelt like a half-finished The Scent spin-off). And I really DO like this a lot, but if I’m honest in the Murderer’s Row of the last three Bottled flankers, I would probably put it third. Some of that’s not fair because Bottled Elixir was literally my Wedding fragrance that I picked out with my wife, so it can’t compete with that in terms of memories and never will, and I’m also one of those weirdos that absolutely adores Bottled Triumph Elixir, which I can’t wait to log because I have full-blown conspiracy theories about that release. This IS amazing in its own right to me though. I don’t get much of the tobacco others say they do even though it’s not one of the notes, to me it’s a mildly sweet resinous thing with a lot of strong but non-Churchy incense and smooth patchouli, held together by a nice sticky Myrrh accord. Myrrh’s one of those notes where I don’t think I have an opinion of one way or the other but then it shows up in a lot of perfumes I really like so it must be doing something. I will say though, if you already have Elixir I would recommend testing this out first because I think there is a decent amount of redundancy between them. I don’t even totally hate that because I’ve been begging this line to find an identity after it abandoned the Apple Pie Thing it was doing before and it’s finally done that, and if you’re into nuance and occasionality you could probably justify owning both because Absolu is a bit classier (says the guy who got married wearing Boss Bottled Elixir), but for NORMAL PEOPLE they might be a bit too similar. 

No this is not the most masculine fragrance in the world. I don’t care. I love every second I wear this. It’s the smell of thick knitwear and corded trousers bundled up in a coat on a really cold day or night. It’s the Harry From When Harry Met Sally Perfume. It’s inviting and personable and warm. I wore this once walking into a pub with a large open fire roaring and I felt like I was in a novel. Possibly not a GOOD novel but most people go through life never feeling like they’ve made into even a BAD book so I’ll take it. I know I’ve referenced books AND a movie in this log but leave me alone, I’m having a moment.

I remember when this first came out, the people who stumbled across it, because that’s basically how Joops sells EVERYTHING in their Homme line, people just randomly find it one day, when they smelled it they were like, “WHERE THE HELL DID THIS COME FROM?!” And yeah, where the Hell DID this come from? It smells nothing like the original Joop Homme, which isn’t really a surprise, outside of a handful flankers very few things in the Joop line smell like the original, Joop is one of those brands that will just shove anything into an Homme-shaped bottle and hope for the best, but the KIND of different it is makes it like nothing else in the line. It is a GENUINELY CLASSY waxy Iris-based bit of perfume that you can pick up for a pittance. I get the Stronger With You comparisons, it does have that kind of sweet nutty backbone to it that I fine every SWY has. If you were to stick this into one those painted up Arabian Special Edition bottles and slap “STRONGER WITH YOU IRIS” on the front I wouldn’t argue with it. I find it MUCH brighter than most is the Stronger With Yous I’ve smelled though, and unlike with them where they all dry down kind of the same with the faintest nuance of the star notes in the Special Editions being detectable only to, frankly, nerds like us, the Iris in this never stops being the star. If you don’t like sweet fragrances, or Iris ones, waxy or otherwise, or honestly any of the SWYs this is definitely not for you, but for the price I paid (£28 brand new from an actual shop only a couple of months after it came out), this is like, GOD-TIER Cheapie. I can and have worn it with a suit. There is a Joop I think you can wear with a suit now. Wonders never cease.