Hugely overpriced fragrance. The first 5 minutes of this are wonderful, rich chocolate and orange, a familiar scent but unusual enough in perfumery. After that, however, it gets dominated by a clean white musk and the chocolate that was so good in the opening drops off far, far too quickly, leaving you with a synthetic, candied orange and white musk, with the telltale Xerjoff vanilla in the base. I can't smell any oud in this whatsoever, there is a very light, very clean leather-like scent that lies buried deep down that I suppose could be the oud, but it has barely any presence and makes this smell akin to the interior of a new, relatively fancy car. This is not a bad fragrance at all, it's actually perfectly pleasant and about 90% on the route to being brilliant, but I can't help but feel let down by both the promise of something much deeper and richer after the spectacular opening that falls far too flat, far too quickly. If it maintained the deep, thick and rich chocolate from the opening it would be stunning, but without it, it struggles to leave the realm of "just good enough" and for the asking price, that's well... not good enough.
I was so curious of this scent first of all because I don’t like the idea of chocolate and orange. I don’t like at all those marmalade chocolates but I was thinking if I don’t test this I will miss something. Secondly I read that this is not so obvious gourmand so I wanted to find some more sophisticated (vanilla/chocolate) gourmand in my collection. I have not so obvious gourmands but now I mean for example Lira, which is nice but I don’t want to smell like that myself. And yes! Like I was thinking about this I felt in love with this. 💛 So addictive beautiful blended scent and yes, this is really obvious white chocolate and orange and I just like it a lot even if I don’t like the smell of those candies or cookies. This is like Kinder with orange! And this really is sophisticated gourmand because it’s not so strong and screaming those gourmand notes after settling down. Everything is in the balance even if I have to admit that this is linear fragrance without any surprises. In the basenotes there is vanilla, Laotian oud, Thailand oud and musk but for all you who don’t like oud: don’t skip this because of that. It’s not animalic or smoky here, it’s just warm and sweet and many of us can’t separate that in this juice. I have read many comments that there wouldn’t be oud at all but it just gives a little bit character to this scent. This is definitely the perfume for colder days. Thank you for reading and I would appreciate a lot if you want to follow me on IG: @ninamariah_perfumes