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.
It’s an aquatic that doesnt smell like a typical blue fragrance. I’ve received more compliments on this than any fragrance I’ve worn in years.
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.
90s indie kid who models his look on Damon Albarn boasts that one day he will become a famous musician, like his idol. He ends up becoming an overweight checkout operator who smokes too much and who over-applies deodorant while at work, in order to avoid unsightly sweat stains. Before falling asleep at night, he looks back with melancholy nostalgia to the days when he would spend his nights clubbing, MDMA'd off his face, dreaming about the untold possibilities his future might hold.
Oh, how very 90s. By which I mean, you have a very clean, floral citrusy scent offet against a slightly herbal, camphorous note that grows in intensity as the floral notes recede.
Midway, it begins to resemble a classic barbershop creation , with lily and iris taking centre-stage, before finally settling to that oft-made comparison to a newly opened packet of cigarettes. The floral sweetness always remains present, though it fluctuates in intensity.
Some fragrances evoke emotions, some specific scenarios, some just smell nice (or otherwise). This one evokes colours: off-white that slowly turns a powdery blue, then back to white again. It is and isn't of its time: yes, it's pinned to a definite era, but it has qualities that enable it to transcend that. It smells modern, but also classic.
Look, this isn't a scent that changed my world. I don't gasp in gratitude that I've had the opportunity of smelling this during my lifetime. However, it is a very pleasant, evocative dumb reach scent that more than justifies the meagre amount you pay for a bottle.
Discontinued but still available at rock bottom prices online, Stash suffered the fate of being ahead of its time.
What you get: peppery pistachio that veers almost towards dry coconut. A smoky birch richness that reminds me a little of Comme Des Garcons' Black. Light incense. Amber-hued musk. Vetiver. Grapefruit.A very light floral note. Sage. The notes are very distinct and clear.
None of these notes would be out of place in a niche scent, but they were probably too challenging for a mainstream celebrity scent at the time. It's also unisex before it was fashionable, light, dry and resolutely lacking in sickly sweetness.
This must surely be the perfume SJP first proposed when the idea of a perfume with her name was first floated. She was told then that the market wasn't ready, and even when Stash was launched, it turned out it still wasn't ready.
Still, that's your gain, and mine. The fact that you can pick up a bottle for under twenty quid is a proper steal. This is a perfect autumn scent for me, and when I haul it out if storage each year, I'm always surprised but quite how good it is. Shame about the bottle - there's a fair bit of evaporation just from leaving it sitting, and that seems a common issue, from what I read. Still, at this price, it's easy enough to buy a backup bottle, even two.
I expected this to be like CdG Avignon but wow it’s not like it at all. This is really pretty and floral I’m getting jasmine and iris. It becomes a bit sweet with amber notes. I really like this.
What a glorious curiosity this is: an off-kilter gourmond of sorts, but also at the same time it also resembles the odd non-perfume Comme des Garcons used to specialise in.
It's available as an extrait and EDP. Both produce roughly the same scent but are made from entirely different ingredients.
So it smells of coffee and of cake (a dry, bready cake). It smells of citrus and of florals. It also smells of ointment, of dry, dusty roads, of sweat and of heat. The EDP is a little sweeter, the extrait a little spicier. Some notes emerge more prominently in one as opposed to the other: the EDP has a prominant liquorice smell at one point, for example, and I can smell the dust more clearly in the latter. Oddly, the extrait doesn’t last as long on my skin, though if I had to choose between the two, that's probably the one I would go for. In both instances, and with most of the Chronotope line, the smells retreats and advances when you least expect it, at times seeing to disappear entirely, then suddenly re-emerging with unexpected force
You don't need to know the backstory to appreciate this: which is perfumer Carter Weeks Maddox following the pilgrimage trail of Camino de Santiago de Compostela, not as an act of devotion, but of exorcism, suffering shattered, infected feet and blood poisoning along the way, fed coffee and almond cake, passing through Spain's arid landscapes. Though you can smell all of those things in the finished scent. You can also imagine it as an abstract avante garde concoction, or conjure up your own scenarios to fit the notes provided. Which is the beauty of perfumery, I suppose.
Like all of Chronotope's perfumes, there's a fierce intelligence and intent on display here, but it's not simply an intellectual exercise: you can feel the emotion put into its creation. It's pretty bloody amazing, and it's next on my perfume shopping list, when funds allow. All the Chronotopes I've sampled so far have been real growers, and it's quickly becoming one of my favourite perfume houses.
Vying surely for the most notes listed in any perfume, Al Bashiq is a clone of Spirit of Dubai's Meydan. Which begs the question, can a clone be a clone when it's owned by the same company?
So I'm presuming this is the same formula but composed of cheaper ingredients. That, and they're relying on mass market volumes to provide roughly equivalent profits to their premium version.
So what does it smell like? It's leathery, woody, fruity, with a pine note that gives it a slighty musty, almost medicinal quality. I'm sure there's something almost like coffee in there too. At one point it moves into definite barbershop territory, shifts into sweetly floral incense, then into a dirty, animalic, quite heavy tobacco. All of this is fairly standard middle-eastern fragrance territory, but the multiplicity of ingredients means it shifts focus frequently and unexpectedly, which gives it added interest.
I liked this quite a lot, but ultimately it didn't quite click: it's feels a little muddy and unfocussed overall, and I wonder if the presumably less expensive materials are responsible for this. It certainly feels as though there's a really stunning perfume waiting to be unleashed, but that never really arrives. A special note of displeasure for the tacky faux-metal eagle lid, which distinctly marks it as the sort of thing you'd see on display in a bargain basement shop: that went in the bin straight away. I'd be really interested to smell the original to see if it manages to cohere in a way this never quite does for me.
Intense white floral and orange blossom explosion. The purpose of this must be to highlight the petitgrain, which is does, but it is so floral, so lacking in some darker ingredient to offset this, that it becomes both wearing and a little nauseating. There's a very mild dusting of cinnamon in there, but it's barely detectable, so it doesn’t do what I imagine it is supposed to do, which is offset that shrill white note.
It becomes more tolerable in the drydown, but I still can't say I like it much.
Antoine Lie's created some of my very favourite fragrances, but this one's a real miss for me.
Legendary cheapo creation from Nathalie Lorson, who is very accomplished at making a very few, inexpensive ingredients go a long way (Encre Noir is another one of her works).
What you get here isn't in any way radical. It's a boozy, sweet wood-floral-incense combo. But it's very well executed, and smells pretty much what you would expect an owner of a Bentley to smell like: wealthy, well turned-out, kind of classy, mature, perhaps a little conservative in outlook. In actuality, they'd probably be wearing bloody Sauvage, but this is an infinitely more preferable option, scent-wise.
Night time in the desert. You're crouched in front of a burning fire, wrapped in a goatskin blanket, drinking coffee. A camel has just taken a dump alongside you but you have an allergy to camels and it has dulled your sense of smell.
Agreeable, mildly woody, mildly leathery, mildy spiced scent that wafts away pleasantly in the background without being either offensive or intoxicating. There's a note of oud, artificial, I'm certain, but a closer approximation of the real thing than a lot of artificial ouds on offer. There are much worse offerings in this style out there, but much better too. I'll happily use up the little sample bottle I have, then will probably never think of it again.
Some perfumes just smell nice (or otherwise). Some evoke particular emotions or associations. And some conjure up very concrete, very definite images. Nouvolari belongs in this last category.
I had no idea who Nouvolari was before reading the blurb about this release (he was a racing driver), but even without that information, it would be easy to picture the scene. This smells of petrol and tarmac, of oily grease and metal, of fumes and sweat and smoke and leather. Mixed in amongst this is a sizeable dose of spearmint, and sparse citrus and rose.
This is the sort of scent that shines outdoors on a cold, still, crisp winter's day. It still smells pretty amazing as an indoor scent, or on cooler days. I would imagine this wouldn't appeal to everyone, it's not a crowd pleaser, but it is incredibly evocative. I loved it, and it proved absolutely worthy of a subsequent full bottle buy.
Aromatic tea steam top with powdered periwinking lily, dry incense dust, Hibiscus wine and crisp paper precisely folded. Play of arrid and wet. Flower musk. Lavender dyed orris rhizome. A confusion of bloom-scented cosmetics.
Not having known the original I must say I absolutely love this one. Very dry, almost desert like. There are florals here which are just under the radar but gorgeous all the same. I pick up a petrol note which is understated but sexy. Cumin is very prevalent in the dry down and super attractive as well. Leather is new. Feels like it may be tannic as well.
Cedar soda with juniper bitters. Water drawn from a limestone well surrounded by briar and bramble, thicket and thorn. Aerated ice chips that shatter between molars. A single cypress cone crushed between fingers. Cigarette ash that never quite made it to the tray. The condensation ring left on wood that won't ever completely fade. Cold metal keys pressed against warm lips. The sharp intake of breath when the cosmic chords of Alice Coltrane's harp arpeggios cascade through space, suspending time. Morning sky like a scrim of quartz; a little light, just enough to see by
Very green, a little sweet, aromatic and aquatic.
Bright with ginger and citrus, and warm with woods and balsams.
A solid every day.
I consider Bel Ami Vetiver to be the best flanker of all time. With that in mind this is probably the second best of all time. I know JCE has a long and distinguished history and even at Hermes his greatest achievement will probably go down as TdH, but, for my money I would (and do) wear BMV and this more often as I consider them to be his best work at Hermes.
Here he took a true 70's masterpiece of a man's scent in Equipage and without destroying the underlying notes was able to snap it in to modern day. In simplest terms I smell a manly floral topping mixed with light spice overlying the traditional equipage powering along in the back ground. I know from reading the notes break down this is geranium (maybe a slight rose) and clove, however, to my nose I may not pick out each individual note but get the overall affect of it.
I am glad I have a bottle. I wouldn't mind picking up a second one. That said, these days this goes for crazy money if you can even find one, but, if you do you won't be disappointed.
