Basically a TF Grey Vetiver clone.
This has been a long time coming. I've finally tried Rogue perfumes after being reasonably 'outspoken' (I understand what IFRA does and crucially what it doesn't do) about the tactic of using non compliance with IFRA as a sales tool and even the whole name of the line being 'Rogue' not sitting with me well at all. In the interests of a broader, less stuffy view of perfumery, I was obviously willing to give these fragrances a try, and I have to say...they're rubbish. hahah No they're not. No disrespect to Cross who I remember being in BN DIY forum once upon a time. I guess the problem I have here is that if your passion is old, discontinued vibes, you're not really looking to be hugely creative (might be being unfair as I've only sampled 3 of them) you're more likely to adapt a old Mitsouko or Coty Chypre formula that is knocking around among hobbyists on the internet, and there's nothing wrong with that. I don't think it's misrepresented, people buying artisan, punk, or 'Rogue' perfume from an Etsy shop are expecting this. Frankly I want more though. It's like competently recreating a recipe at home and adding your own 'twist' it's all fine but it's never going to be anything more elevated than good, home cooking of a slightly hackneyed dish. In this case the dish is a kind of powdery Chypre, which don't get me wrong I massively enjoyed. The opening 5 minutes or so are an absolute treat, fresh citrus and peachy lactones, powdery but dry and retrained floral musk, and a little more animalic perhaps than modern chypres iterations. I mean it's nice after that too, but it starts to come apart somewhat and that's where the amateurish nature of the formula and likely the quality of materials used starts to show it up a bit. It smells like a vision of Mitsouko but made in someone's garage, and with not nearly enough elongation or transition between accords. There's no twinkle or anything that makes it stand out. I feel mean saying this, I don't mean to be, honestly if I made this I'd think it was a decent well rounded perfume.
Very similar to the original but sweeter, smoother and toned down tonka. Can't smell any iris.
This has a strong baby powder presence, however the drydown is where this frag shines. Also longevity is extreamly good with at least 9hrs on my skin
I know nothing about Rimbaud the man, but I like to think I know a little about fragrance, (although that's debatable) this is a very fine lavender. How ever that is conjured, maintained, sustained, created or circumstances leading to the curation of fine lavender material, whatever is going on here the lavender note itself is superior. I would say I don't like a lavender centric perfume and yet it's the basis of fougere's and other predominantly masuline fragrances which I love. Also two which spring to mind, and I find to be clever lavender's are Eau noire and Frederic Malle's Music for a while, two perfumes you wouldn't imagine a non lavender lover would hold in such high regard, but the instant I smelled Rimbaud I left the lavender possessed a certain inimitable quality. Then the softening of the top notes, a fresh bergamot or something? and the pominent lavender dying back into a creamy, white floral wax. It's no where near as cologne, neroli/petitgrain or perhaps big jasmine as you might think, Rimbaud mainly leans on the lovely materials of Nightclubbing namely Orris butter and musk. Now if this was some indy sticking orris in everything as some sort of opulent, signature, calling card, I might cry...'Cheat!' that's cheating everyone loves orris butter, a quick way to phone in luxury, appeal and general thickness. However, here in Celine it appears to be done with great skill and subtlety, masking itself from view and having real development, I haven't checked but I'm assuming they all contain this lovely, creamy thread? Not a bad signature and reminiscent of the arts and materials line from Guerlain and the perpetual custard vanilla. Rimbaud is not quite on par with the lightness of Chanel's Boy or the creativity of Music for a while, however it's more interesting than the reference in this genre, Caron Homme, which is a really lovely vibe between vanilla and lavender. It's nice. I mean is nice good enough at this price? That's upto you, but if you crave those uncluttered aesthetics, and a bit of luxury without the bells and whistles, gold shit and baubles then Celine is a good option for you.
Nice opening but skanky animalic leather drydown which just ruins this fragrance. Do yourself a favour and avoid this and go and purchase XO Brandy by Navitus parfums x Big Beard Business. Enough said.
Unfortunately this one smells like A LOT like the cheap middle eastern frags from brands such as Lattafa or Ard Al Zaafaran etc. And for the price this isn't worth it. Nice frag but for the price you can get much better e.g Oud Satin Mood by MFK🤷♂️.
This is the ULTIMATE "beach/warm/hot holiday/ sand in the toes/ tropical paridise" fragrance. Forget juliet has a gun - vanilla vibes or even tom ford soleil blanc!, even virgin island water!. This here is the best holiday scent period. Literally smells like a sugary minty mojito with some coconut shavings around the mouth of the glass, how can you go wrong🤷♂️. Performance is also heavy on this one too. Perhaps not as potent as their other offerings but still top tier!. This is also DEFINITELY a crowd pleaser👌🏿😎.
First of all this and XO Brandy (navitus parfums) are the best fragrance purchases of 2021!!!. Secondly, the notes are wrong on this. There is no ambroxan in the base. Instead it has frankinsence. Also the mid doesn't have cedar!. Wondering where fragrantica got its notes from🤔🤔. Now as for this fragrance, the name couldn't be anymore fitting!. The bourbon vanilla in it gives off a sort of dusty malt vibe which when coupled with the other notes such as Myrrh, Indian Jasmine, Oud and Vanilla Pompana can present a very elegant/powerful woodsy accord transporting the wearer to a beautiful hot desert. It can really boost ones confidence as you will feel like 💰. It's loud and in your face, yet soft and alluring. Believe me, it is one you DO NOT want to miss😉. The performance on this is absolutely astronomical!!, DO NOT OVERSPRAY!.
Slightly dissapointed with this one due to the hype on it. Not a bad smelling fragrance, don't get me wrong but just not as "Coconut cookie, gourmand creaminess" i was hoping for.
Cherry cherry and more cherry with some other red fruits is basically all you are gonna get from this. Definitely a scent for the ladies!. Fellas you've been warned.
So to my surprise, this ended up being my fav out of the bunch!. Yes even more so than Coco du yemen 😱😱!. This is very very nice, does have a slight similarity to Nishane Ani but nowhere near a clone/dupe. This also leans a little more feminine but smells soooo good that me as a man don't give a **** I'm still gonna rock this bad boy hahaha. It's quite a linear frag but that's fine as the tonka and vanilla are there from the initial blast!.
Yo this here is serious!!!. From first sniff, i was like "yep, this is a keeper" hahahaha. Quite hard to describe the scent but its somewhat sweet, lightly spiced, airy and masculine. This is a crowd pleasing, yet unique scent👌🏿👌🏿. 10/10 in every way.
Omg this smells like arabian oud aseel special edition!!!. For less than a quarter of the price...no brainer👌🏿
I recall trying this one when it came out and liking it so I figured I'd wack it on today and give it a proper review. This brand, I mean, I don't know why I have such a resistance to leaning right into them because they possess those rare perfumery qualities of being both creative and artisan but ACTUALLY balanced and wearable, acceptable, palatable fragrances and I still don't own a one of them. Cape heartache is kinda crude too. That opening is spicy, woody, sappy tree bark, covered in salty sea spray, it's very evocative and just a lovely thing, not merely an outdoorsy smell, but an olfactory shapshot. Let me just reiterate the opening 20 mins of this perfume is brilliant and I love it. Then this building sweetness of a natural feeling maltol edge, with that fruity strawberry approximate accord, sitting atop hollow, hazy modern woody, it sounds nightmarish to me and something I'd scoff at immediately as amateur hour. Unless of course my snobbery mode had been activated, (lets say it was a perfumer for Fredric Malle) then I'd be saying ' this juxtaposition is clever and tantamount to genius' or some pretentious, bias, bollocks like that. haha Well I wouldn't necessarily because as cohesive as it comes together, it does feel very shallow now, like dry, sugar paper and ethyl maltol, but I'm kinda at peace and enjoying it. Yeah, whether this perfume has just caught me on a good day or what I don't know? but it's alright by me. Love the opening, like the contrast lateron.
oooooh so I got this on eBay for less than £20 in the week of it's release. It feels almost, warehouse rave, punk style launch, like you get the tickets and then ring up for a location in a field near Milton Keynes or something? Some people weren't even sure if these were a legit, real launch from Guy Laroche, like someone just mocked up a new fragrance to sell on eBay. haha Imagine that. But no....it's here it's real, and it's a real.....disappointment. Naaaah only kidding, it's pretty good all things considered. My memories of Drakkar Noir are pretty faded but not enough to completely forget them and this Intense definitively has a feel of the Drakkar noir to it. Hold your horses though Houdini!!! This is Drakkar INTENSE, a flanker to the original Drakkar (yes that's a thing) and NOT the wildly more popular and iconic at this point, Noir version. Yeah well I've never tried the original Drakkar and neither has any other human being I've ever encountered. Is it still in production? I've never even seen one, have you? Anyway this has a pleasant sort of green opening, there's a herbal quality to it and it smells familiar and sort of soapy linalool, lavender soap on a smorgasbord of earthy & wet, ranging to warmer and sweeter leather. It's actually quite a reminder of a Lynx from the 90's (I want to say Alaska?) I think that perhaps will mislead you into thinking this is nicer than it is. I think it's nicer than 80% of new releases these days but it's still not great. It feels cheap, because it was/is cheap. There's reward in the drydown though, reasonable depth and a liberal application meant that it lasted well and transitioned to soft, masculine tones on my skin and clothes.
You (well I) sometimes have to remember that the '...smells like...' section is not a smells like at all, it's a '...reminds me of ...' which is a broader church for sure. However, let's just say for arguments sake it's a smells exactly like... then I don't get eau des baux from this, or Lui or Tonnare but perhaps some of the others with tobacco then sure. I will also just preface this review with the fact that today I'm wearing a perfume called also titled smoke, which I'm glad (much like this one) wasn't just a huge OD of smoky cade and birch materials or even that bacon bbq sauce effect of guaiac wood. It's not that, tonally it's much fresher, un smoked tobacco. I've got to say the tobacco note/accord in this AKRO is pretty spectacular, going from smelling like a rich, real absolute, to a deliberately constructed accord with different resonant frequencies. I think the issue with this is that tobacco vanille by Tom Ford kinda set the bar for tobacco fragrances most of which just wanted to replicate that success, quite deliberately. This has the cherry and fruity tones but it's more manure like with a natural sweetness not coming from a glug of vanilla. As a result this is more bittersweet and tabacco like, so is it just TV minus the Vanilla? In very simplistic terms yes, but I can't help but respect the craft of this perfume and I definitely like it. My tobacco vanille has a balsamic sharpness and I do mean vinegar to it which I can't really abide anymore, this Smoke I could probably live with much better. However, it's rare I find myself in the mood for such things these days. Objectively speaking it's a well made, less cloying tobacco vanille type approximation with a little more about it that your average deliberate, smell alike, which I sense from the spirit of this perfume and it's development on skin, not what was intended.
This is the best one of the collection, an absolute dirt box of a scent. It's clean meets dirty in the most balanced way. I think it's very clever and I don't recall smelling a rose like this?? First of all it opens up and you're like 'okay, they needed to do some more conventional stuff and this is the "rose one" right?' It's a modern, airy rose and it's very nice, immediately sweet but not trying too hard. Then you get this wack of BO and then the interplay between them. It's not straight cumin or musk or some crappy clumsy civet replacer, it's like an air of mild BO, and it feels human, it dances around with the rose in a very specific way. There's a sheerness, there's a lightness to it and that's how it gets away with what it's doing here, spicing a rose to within an inch of it's life, but doing it with a certain elegance and lightness of touch. I was reminded of that bulls blood one from Imaginary authors which is creatively a superb perfume but one I couldn't wear, ever! That is rose and shit though, as apposed to this which is rose and sweat. That's kind of relentless and dense and this is translucent. I like it a lot but it would be a novelty in my collection due to the fact I'd be reluctant to wear it in polite company, as your friends might think you've not had a wash. We all say 'I wear perfume for me' and while that is true, I also care what others think, I do, can't help it. There's something so modern about Night, with it's stark contrasts and strange simplicity. I've gotta be honest I think it's absolutely brilliant.
On a personal note, I don't really like too many boozy fragrances, especially focused on malty/malt whisky effects. This is very malty in the opening, almost unpleasantly so. In fact, I plain don't like this fragrance. Just saying. I get the play of whisky and leather, it works but moreso for me in 'thinner' compositions like Gold leather by atelier cologne this thing is thick, grainy and textured with malt, which some will like. It's not particularly smooth or crowd pleasing which again might give it more brownie points with the hardcore enthusiasts but not with me. It's whisky but this is more bells than Oban, it's just a little rough. Interesting that it's compared to midnight stroll here which does have a turbulent opening settling to a leather/incense for me and that's not quite what's going on in this perfume for me. perhaps I need to revisit both and see?
I mean the name would heavily imply that this is a cannabis perfume and I could've sworn hearing promotion and Cresp himself saying it (perhaps I imagined that?) but I'd say it's supposed to at least be evocative of cannabis rather than a 'cannabis fragrance' something which seemed to be all the rage a couple of years back. First my issue with cannabis fragrances is that they're has not been to date (at least not one I've tried) which portrays cannabis flowers accurately. They do accurately capture the spicy, green, vegetative state of young cannabis plants (mispent youth and trips to the dam is how I know) and this seems to be an accord that has either been arrived at independently by perfumers or has been shipped around/aka plagiarized. Either way I don't want to smell like it as a central theme of a perfume, nor do I feel it accurately accounts for the varied terpene and flavanoid profiles of the bewildering amount of strains of weed available these days. This is slightly off topic but I'd very much like to create a perfume based on cannabis which is truly reflective of this. More about that another time perhaps? Well I'm glad to say that Haze doesn't opt for that cheap option, make a vaguely green, herbal, spicy scent and just be done with it, I respect that Haze is a composition. Just on 'Haze' which is a sub variety of mainly sativa dominant cannabis, I thought Olivier may have been so specific to call it that as he had captured the haze smell. Haze does have a very distinctive smell and many cannabis connoisseurs will often use it as a descriptor ie; 'This bud smells/tastes very hazy.' for instance. ANYWAY this perfume has a very interesting take on creating a cannabis feel because it's soooo slight as to be almost subliminal and although I was bemoaning the 'accuracy' earlier I think be mildly evocative and still be perfume or smell interesting and faceted like the flowers, or kind don't bother, so this hits the former. I'd say it 's very sweet opening gives way to a more green, herbal effect and you get that sage or clary sage just countering the sweetness slightly. However, I find it a bit of an oddball, the opening sweetness is a touch icky, and some of that spicy, hashish accord does bleed through ever so slightly. I don't hate it like some of those other ones from Bois 1920 or whatever but I still wouldn't wear this either and it's nothing to do with cannabis, it's just not a perfume I found enjoyable. (although as a point of transparency I haven't worn it properly yet so an update to this review could say different but I doubt it)
To be honest I felt Dark was a very competent spicy, dry, woody, incense type accord with a hint of the gourmand about it. Dark was the most conventional 'perfume' in this collection so far, the labdanic effects and resinous feel was more AC constructed than natural, which is fine by and makes for an excellent, cozy, tenacious brew. Dark has a dark complexion for sure, which I guess is a plus point in terms of matching it's brief. I like it, I'd wear it with no complaints and enjoy it, but it makes me feel very little.
Opens with a hint of H24 and citrus. Then goes to a mix of the OG with the intense vetiver of Terre d'Hermes Intense Vetiver.
Sadly, due to social media and my own fascination with Olivier Cresp's own brand AKRO I'd heard quite a bit about these prior to finally ordering the sample set and sniffing them this week. Everyone said Awake was a reference coffee centric or big coffee noted fragrance, what a disappointment then that it isn't. Has a touch of mint and chocolate in the opening, it's not cacao powder or dark, it's more drinking or milk chocolate, perhaps benzoin too. Then clearly the coffee starts to percolate and it's gets a little bitterness in the background which I enjoy, but it's not the bracing, straight up triple shot I was anticipating. If you were thinking it might be along the lines of Kerosene Follow then prepare for disappointment. I mean clearly it's well made and other stuff is happening but the woody, diffusive base and relentless choco/coffee combo is not something I want to smell of and feels like a novelty fragrance I have a hard time taking seriously. I wanted to love it, and as a collection (in hindsight having smelled them all at time of writing this) they hang together somewhat cohesively, but largely as a collection of fragrances I personally don't see myself reaching for.
I'm looking through the reviews here and the amount of fragrances this is compared to is quite staggering, but usually that speaks to a degree of creativity, inevitable tropes which are being carefully negotiated to create something reasonably 'new'. I first got a sample of this years ago and I'm only just getting around to wearing it, the short review would be...yeah. I quite like it. The slightly longer review would say that the opening is mixture of flattened Terre d'Hermes minus any pepperiness or vetiver but with that bitter orange and a lightly spoiled vintage Eau Sauvage, just to add to the list of comparitors and confusion if you're trying to get a feel for this perfume by reading Fragrantica reviews...which is never something I'd advise, especially of they're mine! lol After that settles it's a bit like a fresher Hope by Agonist a sort of translucent, woody accord with that candied orange presence. However, the drydown and remnant on my clothes is a completely different and reveals a base which does indeed give some credence to mentions of Tauer's LDDM and even faintly Obsession for women. It's a faintly sandy, waxy, floral wood. I quite like it. I'm wearing it today and it's not been boring or anything. I mean I tend to like the style of this brand it's kinda modern but I don't like the prices. That's not necessarily me declaring they're not worth it, just if they were about a third of the price I might be more interested in owning one myself.
