As nice as this is, it's too strong for me. This is very headache inducing...you've been ⚠️. Pineapples, rose and florals with some musk is what I'm getting.
What a nice freesia fragrance! It lasts quite long, settled into a wonderful warm base, I wouldn't expect anything better from such fashion brand.
Beautiful tea scent, I love to put it on while watching the latest season of White Lotus, it fits the vibe!
I love this, there's something fresh and sunny about it, a little bit of body skank and a warm nutty base. To me it's not christmassy, it's joyous and springtime-esque. I don't always want beast mode perfumes, so this is perfect for times when I want a little spritz here and there with a few minutes of bedazzlement before it becomes polite and discreet. The orange note smells like Baptême du Feu, but this quickly dissipates and the scent becomes totally different to BdF, although I'm assuming those who like one would like the other. This could be the daytime scent before applying BdF for nighttime devilry. Update: OK yes, it dissappears after one hour, but I'm OK with that as it cost me peanuts.
Very aromatic lavender and mint opening with bitter orange and a kind of ozonic note joining quickly in the top. Nothing challenging or astringent about the aromatics. I think this has a violet leaf note somewhere in it. Mid adds some sage, but mostly the top carries through into the mid maintaining a fresh, incredibly clean aromatic scent. Ambrette and ambroxan create a clean musky diffusive base. My personal favorite in the line. Classic Prada cleanliness without some of the sweet powderiness of the other masculine freshies from the brand, which makes this stand out to me.
Slightly warm, yet fresh, spicy opening with nutmeg and cardamom. I get a slight cinnamon warming up the spice blend. A sweet date and rose accord takes over quickly, saffron giving an almost buttery texture. Rose is kind of jammy without being cloying. Almond, heliotrope and a clean muskiness take over in the base. Wafts of soapy aldehydes fade in and out throughout the wearing experience. Final dry down of ambroxan after about 7-8 hours. Gives a vibe of very posh, high quality almond blossom lotion.
"HELLO GORGEOUS"
Bo opens with a woody toasted marshmallow like smoke. Resins, incense and tobacco? The scent transitions to a brighter cedar wood scent with hints of vanilla wafting around. It slowly warms but always remains slightly resinous, woody and vanilla. Perfect. Performance is great and it smells really good. Bo lives in the realm of G Water, but actually performs really well. Very easy to wear in any occasion.
Walk up to an aged fig tree, late summer, loaded with fruit. Snap a fig leaf, smell the astringent greenness. Watch the milky substance ooze out, rub it between your fingers, smell the slightly sweet coconut-ness. Sniff a freshly cut pear (don’t ask). Bite into a soft ripe fig. Put your nose to the lichen covered bark of the aged fig tree, breathe it in.
Bitter, earthy, spicy opening, a bit like cut parsnips. Bitterness dies down pretty quickly. Rindy bitter orange with nice dry spices carry the top into a mid with a kind of geranium and a mineral earthiness. Base of a vetiver hand creamy vibe ever so slightly sweetened with benzoin. Final dry down is mostly a light ambroxan skin smell after about 6 hours. Timeless, modern, masculine, classic Elena.
A really lovely bright citrussy white floral. Aromatic with a gentle musky softness.
Not much more to it than that.
Cut lillies lying in a pool of brackish sea water. Wetland earth with sparse wildflowers growing amid thick greenery. A hint of peppery incense in the air.
Duration is impressive, the lilly note constant though to the drydown, at which point woody, amber notes become more prominent.
This a strange, cold and beautifully funereal creation, as befits its name. It's also pretty dark - there's a suggestion of something wild and unfettered lurking around the edges of the scent, even though its core is very still. One of the high points in the Beaufort range, and one of its more approachable creations as well.
Cheap imitation leather jacket sprayed with sickly floral air freshener. Supposed clone of Les Absolus d'Orient Cuir Intense, which I haven't sampled.
Perfectly serviceable starter fragrance for this category. Go easy on the sprays, or this may induce a headache.
Man oh man, I love this one. I wish they didn’t discontinue it. If you love sour, juicy, realistic grapefruit, you’ll love this. I want this in my rotation forever. Lately I’ve been layering it with Classic Green by Banana Republic which has a green tea bubble bath quality that pairs BEAUTIFULLY with this. I really love the way I feel throughout the day when I catch the pair on my collar.
Suffocatingly strong and dense. But it does smell good. It's kind of similar to Reflection Woman. I'd say if RW is a light sorbet this is a fatty, creamy ice-cream version.
So apparently this perfume is by the brand 'The Ordinary' and was formulated by it's creator, who is sadly no longer with us. I don't really know a great deal about all that, but I know that the cosmetics are well received and visionary according to folks who care about such things. I believe I know perfume fairly well and what I like, even in a lack lustre, beige release such as this one are some degree of coherent brand messaging, and I would certainly expect this to be the smell of a minimalist, hipster variety and it doesn't disappoint. This is the conjured smell of a blank canvas space, the lightly dusted floor, bare plaster walls, rendered stone, a light wash of emulsion. This is much more of a textural mood board than it is an attention grabbing perfume to smell nice or simply smell.... of. The peppery top notes are clearly there but at the same time about as austere as you can get, a sort of low impact incense and the rest is just a woody/stoney plinth which it sits atop. For what it is.... I quite like it for the same reason I like stuff like CdG, they're modern and cool. I like that it has exclusivity but not that gold encrusted, gawdy Harrods exclusivity more of a cool 'diggin; in the crates', trendy coffee shop vibe, and not because I enjoy the pretentiousness, simply because it's kinda cool that you actually have to seek something out in this age where we can tap our phones and have something arrive the next day. This is more of a 'if you know... you know...' sort of thing. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't even advertise it. It's that fucking cool! I also like the fact that it's not a silly price, because it shouldn't be. Functional perfume. This wasn't made to appeal to perfume fans but inadvertently a certain cohort of them will make Avestan a cult classic.
Lovely. Just lovely. A breath of fresh air on this pre spring day (well it technically is Spring but you wouldn't know it) fresh lovely floral accord with lightly powdery undertrappings all smoothly delivered. The execution of Santa Maria Novella is so good I never fail to be impressed even with overtly femme and things I don't often opt to wear myself, this has been a thorough reward, an absolute joy.
I found the opening of this to be refreshingly unique, citrus yet again smacking at the helm of a lumbering ship of notes and accords. After about ten seconds I was like 'what is that'? eventually realising it was a really nutty smell. I'd love to know how this was achieved? Pyrazines perhaps? It's fairly fleeting but then the drydown is again a sweet, amber musk hint of rose, skin scent, sitting close and musky. Hard not to like, but easy to exclude from any elite level of perfumery because they just seem so clunky and deliberate, perfumery is about mystique for me and Argos just seem to lack it for some reason and it's a damn shame because the imagery they employ references to classical artworks and their inspirations, rather than seeming cheesy or phoned in, are actually quite authentic. All the blurbs are flowery as expected but I just think.... fair enough. I'm going soft in my old age I think?
I found this hard to dislike. It's a bit of a mess really but crucially doesn't smell bad. The top notes are really defined bergmot and these higher concentration, niche and indy brands seem to get that right consistently. but underneath is a sort of complex soup of amber, woody, musk. It's quite lovely but dolloped on with little finesse or stand out 'notes' it seems.
Perhaps I'm missing something here but this perfume is not a direct clone of Tuscan Leather. To look at the notes in my carded sample, you'd think it was and then coming here and seeing swathes of smells likes, I'm just not feeling that way. The fundemntal things which make tuscan leather are in fact a sort of rough sawn woody, sandalwood base which this simply doesn't possess. Some fleeting association this does have a rspberry note (if you must) a leather accord of sorts and a dry, smoked birch airy ambrox effect effect but the metallic spikes and sour citrus give this a whole different dimension. This has more incommon with Aventus than it does Tuscan leather. To be honest it reminds me much more of a Xerjoff (name escapes me) a Memo (name escapes me.... albeit something leather.... not that that would narrow it down...lol) and finally one I can actually name Rasai Ambergris Showers. I didn't hate this either but it felt a little more redundant as if chasing hints of hit perfumes here and there but ultimately coming out with something different but still derivative feeling. It's alright.
My son loves this. I’m not a big fan, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s a bad perfume. It’s just not my vibe. If you are single, wear this on a date. If you are in a relationship, don’t you dare wear this out. A little too on the nose in my opinion as far as smelling like someone who wants to wear a fragrance to be alluring. One spray lasts all day. I don’t recommend wearing it in warm weather. Also, this is way better than the original.
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.
I want to say that this fragrance is terrible/awful whatever, because it's egregiously saccharine opening is only matched by it's appalling creamed tobacco drydown. Not only that but quite impressively it manages to shoehorn in the irritant that is the apple note/accord and yes you can smell that too despite all this other mental noise, including waxy floral note banana jasmine/ylang which lasts the first 30mins or so! And yet somehow I don't hate it. Yeah. Bizarre. I think I'm having a stroke or something? I mean it's bad. It's objectively bad but there's almost something admiral about the fact it concisely conveys all these things in one stonking, lump of a perfume. It's not for me, but it might be for someone. (with no taste, or who like I think I do, likes it ironically or for kitsch value)
Okay so in the interest of full disclosure I went into this sampling with trepidation and conscious bias against Argos as a brand for reasons too long and pointless to go into but let's just say my hopes were not high and I did relish the idea of slating these perfumes in the public forum that is Fragrantica. However, In Argos Pour Homme I was greeted by quite a likable designer masculine vibe with a sort of niche/indy sensibility and certain clunkiness of materials which I found quite pleasant and even...almost endearing. Yeah I know. I'm as shocked as you are. To me the opening was a nice bergamot and gin fizz sparkle which gives way to a mild lavender and violet, and is all quite fun and such if a bit heavy handed. Then the drydown resembles a sort of Paco Rabanne XS/ Creed Himalya type thing a sort of sage, white floral induced, creamy barber base. I really quite liked it.
