Someone has emptied a freshly filled baby's nappy and a few drops of vanilla essence into your rose garden. Nourished, the roses respond by blooming briefly and intensely before dying back to an airy, transparent scent that hangs in the still air.

Once past the shitty oud opening, this is very much a refined rose scent that clings close to the skin. Best suited to cooler weather, in the evening. You will need invest in a second mortgage before being able to purchase a full-sized bottle.

In the smoky, fetid dark room of The Anvil, in a fit of licentiousness, someone's sweaty leather jock strap has been discarded on the stained pine floorboards. You pick it up and sniff it.

Leather-heavy animalic, with an unexpected, slightly sweet undercurrent that breaks through on occasion. Dries down to a calm, post-coupling combination of myrrh and spices. Longevity is impressive, sillage moderate. This was a blind buy and is pretty glorious.

Very green, somewhat milky scent in the opening. It reminds me of the milky sap you get in some plants when the stems are broken. I get red berries too, and there's something almost like liquorice hidden deep down in the mixture. As it progresses, the green remains but the texture turns airy then powdery and there's the slightest suggestion of pepper. It still somehow gives that impression of something creamy white yet green at the same time.

I struggled to identify precisely what the green scent was until I saw bamboo in the notes listing, and that made concrete that very particular scent memory, one of being abroad, in the bamboo groves, on a hot, humid day, one that made the scent hang almost densely in the air.

Light and delicate, this fade quickly unless oversprayed, at which point it remains present for a reasonable length of time. It is very zen, very calming and rather beautiful.

This was the very first perfume I bought many years ago, in the mid 90s. It seemed both unbelievably expensive (a bottle then cost much the same as a bottle now), and totally unique. It reminded me of the Issey Miyake clothing line, which featured heavily in magazines like The Face, clipped and minimal, yet playful in the way it experimented with form. I wore it daily for years.

Recently, in a fit of nostalgia, I bought a bottle again. And it still smells good. There's the initial burst of sherberty citrus, which at the time I thought was lemon but now know to be yazu. The floral notes are more obvious as well, white floral, something that escaped me in all those years when it was my daily wear. When it settles down, the yazu is still there, but it's less dominating and the spices - nutmeg and sandalwood in particular are allowed to come through.

It still seems very clean and stipped down and there's still nothing that is quite like it. Longevity is poorer than I remember, but it doesn't seem to have wandered far from its original formulation.

A bit of a classic designer frag this, one that has worn the passage of time very well.

Or: why do I keep on blind buying these middle-eastern clones?

There's a massive blast of musty mango and saffron in the opening..subtlety is not the order of the day here. Despite the force of the scent, it still manages to be both insipid and sickly.

Then, one extreme to the other, it dries down to a powdery ozonic suede, mixed with sweet citrus, at which point it more or less becomes a skin scent.

This phase isn't unpleasant, but this is lacking something, something sharper and harder to contast with or emphasise the dominant notes. As it is, it's rather anonymous and, worst of all sins, ultimately rather boring.

And to answer the question as to why I keep on buying these? Because a) they're cheap and b) occasionally I'll encounter the occasionally absolute banger of a scent. Masa, alas, is not one of these. Pass.

In the corner of the garden, an underground pipe has sprung a leak and green and bitter gabalnum grows there in the cente of a permanent pool of rusty water. Someone stands close by, chain smoking. He is wearing leather chaps and little else. On seeing you watching, he sprawls on a nearby wooden bench and winks at you in a "come and get me" kind of way. You notice he is wearing a heavy gold medallion, which hangs midway down his noticeably hirsute chest.

A supposed clone of Thom Ford's Noir Anthracite, which in turn was a distinct nod to 70s barbershop fragrances, this really occupies 'inspired by' territory, as opposed to being an out and out clone. It very green, brash in its opening, but its really that ash-like metallic note that elevates it.

Inexpensive, long lasting and, ultimately, a really good scent. An overlooked gem in amongst the multitudes of overhyped middle eastern perfumes, most of which seldom match the level of attention given to them.

You are in Hawksmoor's Spitalfields church, the one with the austere, looming architecture and souce of sometimes intriguing and sometimes downright silly occult conspiracy theories.

Inside, it's smoky, dark and cold because someone has turned out the lights. Perhaps it's the priest, who has nipped outside for a quick fag. You are dressed in leather, sucking on an aniseed drop and for some reason are clutching a sheaf of old, yellowed newspapers. The smell of burnt incense has impregnated the stone walls. There is no-one else in the building but, ominously, there is sound of movement from the vauts below.

This is rather gorgeous. Tamer in intensity than some of the others in the Beaufort range, this is, a bit like the church that inspired it, at first cold and forbidding, but gains in wamth as it dries down, before the stone coldness rushes back. One of my favourites in the Beaufort range, and one of the very few I would consider wearing in a work environment.

Very strong and dark jammy rose scent that is tempered by metallic notes. It's both lushly decedent and aloof, as though the Berlin in which it's set is the Weimar era, with its hedonism increasingly overshadowed by the threat of curdled nationalism and war.

As this fades, the rose settles in with another contradictory combination: honied, earthy animalics.

This isn't a cozy creatuon: its beauty has an edge, and you can see why so many reviewers find it has a gothic allure. To me, the images it conjures are more modern than that: this is the scent of someone travelling through an exciting but exacting city, smartly dressed, on their way to an illicit assignation.

Depending on how you like your roses, you may find this a little too austere, or dark. It's certainly not a comforting scent, but it's a strange and beautiful one.

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.