Very strong and dark jammy rose scent that is tempered by metallic notes. It's both lushly decedent and aloof, as though the Berlin in which it's set is the Weimar era, with its hedonism increasingly overshadowed by the threat of curdled nationalism and war.

As this fades, the rose settles in with another contradictory combination: honied, earthy animalics.

This isn't a cozy creatuon: its beauty has an edge, and you can see why so many reviewers find it has a gothic allure. To me, the images it conjures are more modern than that: this is the scent of someone travelling through an exciting but exacting city, smartly dressed, on their way to an illicit assignation.

Depending on how you like your roses, you may find this a little too austere, or dark. It's certainly not a comforting scent, but it's a strange and beautiful one.

Starts off dirty and proceeds to get dirtier. Burnt plastic, a freshly-varnished floor, liquorice and a freshly-brewed mug of coffee. And that's just the opening. The bitter, plastic notes become very prominent for a time, mixed in with geranium. Frankincense seeps through, mingled with an odd rubbery note. Then it turns sweeter, vanilla thrown into the mix, along with a scent that reminds me of the odour of my cat's fur when she sticks her arse in my face, as cats are wont to do. Then a surprise: it flips back to the varnish smell that appeared at the very beginning, this time mixed in with something floral and fruity.

This is a clever, tricksy perfume that shifts though its many different phases quite rapidly. I didn't really get much in the way of the animalic notes promised, not until the very end, but the overall impression is of something funky and carnal, of entirely NSFW happenings in the basement of a disreputable club somewhere.

A photorealistic evocation of wading through wet, knee high wild vegetation immediately after a heavy shower of rain. Wild mint is especially promiment, and there's the dank smell of earth underneath it all. The scent is a little bitter and very, very green.

This scene established, it doesn't develop so much as fade to a pleasant earthy, grassy vetiver base that has definite echoes of Terre d'Hermes. This lasts an absolute age on my skin, though vetiver generally does last an eternity on me anyway, so its longevity will very much depend upon your akin chemistry, I guess.

So a perfume of two parts: the first is very striking, the second, less so, though both are very agreeable. I just wish the originality of the opening had been carried through to the drydown.

Resinous high church incense, a little bit boozy, as though the priest has been hitting the bottle immediately before communion. There's something hay-like mixed in, along with mandarin and lemon and an astringent ivy note, reminiscent of the one in Beach Hut Man. As it settles, a strong cedar emerges, and as does frankincense, along with a fairly light vetiver-patchouli combo. It's a monastery in the Mediterranean somewhere, inland, at twilight on a very still day. As it dries down, it loses some of its distinctiveness, and there's that common ambery drydown shared by so many other incense-heavy perfumes.

This is the first perfume from La Manufacture I've sampled. Looking at the rest of their line, they appear to specialise in riffs on well-known perfumes. If so, I've no idea what this one is a variation of. Nor what the concentration might be: what I can say is my skin has an oily glaze after spraying this, which suggests the concentration of perfume oils must be quite high. It's also pretty powerful: a couple of sprays of this is plenty.

What it is though, is pretty good. There's enough sweetness and shapness not to make this solely a head shop bomb, or be overly reminiscent of a priest swinging a thurible with enough burning incense to set off the fire alarms. There's nothing here that's revolutionary, but it's very well executed with decent-quality ingredients, with enough callbacks and surprises to avoid linearity. Worth hunting out, especially when bottles often turn up heavily discounted on online stores.

You are drinking a cup of cold, black tea while sitting on a wooden bench situated on the edge of a pine forest. Alongside you, a hippie is eating a big slice of heavily-herbed pizza. His clothes are impregnated with the smell of incense.

Light, understated and very pleasant, but frankly not a great deal more than that. It wafts away inconspicuously and every now and again you'll catch a whiff and think, "Oh, that smells nice." What I'd hoped and expected from the note listing though was to be wowed, and this didn't come anywhere near that. This had nearly been a blind buy, but I'm very glad I opted for a sample instead. All a bit meh, really.

Celebrity scents? They're usually a bit meh, let's be honest. Slap a celeb name on the front, design a crowd-pleaser with DNA stolen from whatever is popular on the market at the moment, and flood high street shops with bottles in hope of attracting the eye of the casual fragrance buyer.

Occasionally, a really good one somehow slips through. GIRL was formulated by Comme des Garcons with heavy input from Pharrell Williams, and packaged in an eye catching bottle designed by KAWS. And then it bombed. Far from the ten millon it was hoped the perfume would generate, it was available through online discounters at a fraction of the original asking price, faster than a dud single slips down the charts.

Their loss is your gain. It's really rather good, if not crowd-pleasing (therein lying its downfall).

At first, this is mostly violet, intensely peppery , coupled with lavender to give it an additional boost. That opening is very strong: it's the most violetly violet scent you could imagine, as though Farenheit had coupled with Grey Flannel and produced a monstrous, mutant offspring.

The violet lessens in intensity but always remains present, though gradually other notes join the mix: primarily iris, vetiver and cedar. What it lacks is the lighteness and airiness I mentally always associate with a CDG scent. It's also fairly linear, though you presume that, when you have Antoine Lie as one of the perfumers, this is a deliberate choice.

Would I have paid the full asking price for this when it was first released? It's difficult to say. But it is a perfume I wear often, and with pleasure. At the vastly reduced cost that this can be picked up for though, it's a bit of a no-brainer.

As a child, when Saturday morning cartoon shows were still a thing, I used to watch a series called Arabian Knights, a short-lived and cheesy Hannah Barbera show about Arabian adventurers foiling rather faceless baddies in some unspecified desert location that bore an uncanny resemblence to Monument Valley. Invariably, there were displays of magic and the inevitable flying carpet.

That's what the opening of Shazam reminds me of. It's bright and fruity and full of primary colours. This quickly turns to a lulling amber. It's very well blended so individual notes are hard to pick out, though vanilla, a creamy frankincense and patchouli are especially prominent. And is that a whiff of basil? Not a million miles away from other middle-eastern themed perfumes, but it's very well done, though it veers a little on the sweet side for my taste. Its downfall lies in its longevity, gone a in a few hours bar the faintest of skin scents, so frequent reapplications are necessary.

PDM Layton clone. Spiced apple pie laced with caramel sauce and with a sideserving of vanilla ice cream. After wolfing it down, you become aware of the very pungent vase of flowers placed on your table. Also, you feel a little sick.

Notoriously housed in one of the most awkward bottles known to man, with a cap that seems expressly designed to lift the sprayer off when it is removed, how you react to this fragrance will very much depend upon you react to Layton, this being as close an approximation of the original as you are likely to get at this price point.

The first time I wore this, I was really quite impressed, in a "that smells nice" sort of way. The second time, the faults in the scent profile became apparent: it blankets you in a nauseatingly sweet fog that becomes increasingly intolerable, and is the very definition of a scrubber. Which I did, at the very first opportunity.

That said, it's very well done for what it is, and if this is your sort of scent profile, it's worth hunting out.

The first time I smelt Jacomo de Jacomo, I honestly thought it was the most amazing perfume I had encountered. A clove-heavy lavender bomb, marinated in an ashtray with a soapy-woody drydown. There's the bitterness of gabalnum, a hint of florals and of incense thrown into the mix too.

Now, older and supposedly more mature, I know there are much better fragrances out there. But you know what? It still smells pretty good. In some ways it's the epitome of a 1980s scent, a powerhouse designed to both merge with and cut through a smoke-laden bar or nightclub. Now that times have changed, the reformulation is weaker, to the point that longevity could be more persistent. With that caveat, it wears its age very well, and it now slips comfortably into the category of a classic middle-aged man's perfume. Proof, I suppose, that its audience has grown older with it, and its demographic shifted in the process. No reason someone younger couldn't wear this though, particularly those in the alternative scenes.

Cheap as chips and designed to make you stand out amidst the plethora of sweet and blue designer scents out there.

A brief smoky opening gives way to a rich sandalwood that is an almost gourmandish toffee, with a layer of apricot running beneath it. That's followed by a warm vetiver, and then sweet cedar. As it dries down, there's a mildly earthy quality that is reminiscent of dry, dusty earth. I don't get the patchouli listed in the notes at all. The apricot remains present throughout.

At first, I really thought I was going to to be something special, but as it progresses, it loses its uniqueness and begins to resemble other fragrances in the 4160 Tuesdays line.

The problem is that that everything in the scent seems sweet, even the vetiver/earthy notes. It's not saccharine, or sugary, more a warm, jammy quality : this is something that seems core to the brand's DNA, and it's not one I'm terribly fond of. I'd be interested to see them coming up with a perfume that avoids it altogether, because that would be much more to my taste. As it is, this one's very pleasant, I enjoy it, but I don't love it.