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Viking is a beautiful aromatic fougere with clean and traditional masculine qualities. It opens with a bright citrus top of bergamot, lemon and orange, alongside a sharp mint and aromatic lavender. In the heart there’s a touch of warm spices coming from the clove and allspice, while soft florals balance things out. The pink pepper is very prominent too, however not in your face. It blends very well with the mint and lavender to leave you with a very clean and elegant barbershop style fragrance. It leans quite mature in my opinion, for older men who dress smart, and is definitely one of my favourites from Creed. Overall, Viking is a gorgeous perfume which is perfect for spring and formal wear - the materials smell very high quality and are fantastically blended too. Unfortunately the performance isn’t great however that’s expected with all Creed releases these days.
I was sat in my friends tattoo shop yesterday listening to a couple of well groomed young lads discussing fragrance and specifically how many Creeds they owned. I decided not to chime in with my opinion, not least because the talked turned to this fragrance and I realised I hadn't tried it. Viking was something that was much anticipated and maybe all that pressure has amounted to an anticlimax...so I immediately went to find out. What Viking does deliver is a very strange and complex opening which sadly the rest of the fragrance doesn't live up to. The top notes to me smelled like a mixture of mango, sweet berries, licourice, mint, patchouli and saffron...EXACTLY! a mad combination. It had a quality of Versace Man (The discontinued purple bottle) or the Oud or even a bit of PHII but the main accord of this perfume soon prevailed, showing it's fangs and truly what this scent was about. That is...Aventus. A kind of fruity cocktail consisting of a kind of pina colada but with exotic mango or something, the refreshing ice lolly cleanness of many Creeds like millisime Imperial or Erolfa etc... but with an underlying and unsettling heft in the form of something a bit smoky and woody giving masculine purpose to what is an otherwise fruity/musk perfume. I think it's due to a note I love... pink pepper. It's usually quite a fleeting top note but was very interesting to see the composition using it so heavily and maybe the cause of all that confusion to start with? It's a bit like a desert which utilises the fragrant sweet heat of pin pepper to accent and cut through the fruit. The problem I have is that for all Aventus faults or people's taste just not being attuned to it. Aventus has something natural, raw and primal about that pinapple/birch tar combo. Viking feels more chemical and much more modern in the wake of recent popular releases in precisely the same way that the ladies version of Aventus did. An Aventus 2.0 then and Creed can charge what they want because people will inevitably buy this stuff for that reason. Performance was good but I had a sneaking suspicion it would be atomic but it wasn't. This is a muddled review but don't get it twisted....I didn't hate Viking, and will definitely be wearing it again to further flesh out my opinions, because it's kinda interesting and not a simple open and shut case. Incidentally one of lads in the shop concluded that despite owning millisime Imperial and Aventus he thought that £185 for 50mls was far too expensive for this perfume and I'm inclined to agree there.
