fragrances
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My Signature
627 reviews
It's an interesting experience to smell this chemical once, and see what it does on the skin, but it's pretty horrible. There's a reason it's blended with other things to make proper perfume. This is industrial, plasticky, glue-like vetiver, with car interior and a dash of something you'd use to clean your oven. Immediate scrubber, never again. (showering) And of course it's impossible to remove, although after a thorough scouring it's less repulsiv at least.
I'm wearing Guidance on one arm and Guidance 46 on the other. Guidance is very Bisch. It immediately reminds me of Encelade, but with more depth and sweetness (though nowhere near as sweet as the Extrait version). I quickly start to pick up on a sort of foot-cheese, sweaty off note, which doesn't put me off exactly but I can see why I would deter others. The sillage is giving me pretty perfume while the up close sniff is sweaty jock-strap (none of that in the Extrait). I like this, it's not my thing, as quite honestly I'd rather wear Encelade, it's more edgy, but this smells opulent and performs very well, of course. The Extrait does seem smoother and more refined, but it also lacks the hook. It's way sweeter and more incensey. I wish they'd upped the weirdness rather than the sweetness.
I'm not sure if my miniature has turned, but to me this is half perfume half burrito. The coriander is SO strong and something about this with the cinammon is too culinary for my taste (boom).
Sniffing my way through ten samples from this house, and I'm realising they're mostly syrupy sugar-bombs, and this is one of the sweetest of them all. If that's your thing, you might like this but this type of perfume is nauseating to me after 10 minutes max.
Sickly, cloying, cheap-smelling, diabetes-inducingly sweet. In the wheelhouse of masculine JPG fragrances but more obnoxious if such a thing is possible.
Scratchy, toxic, cheap-smelling, loud, needy, macho, just absolutely awful.
Lavender-filled condoms.
The notes listed don't represent what I'm smelling. For me it's strong tonka, rose, fruit (as a review said below, blueberries) and saffron. The other notes are there if I squint and use my imagination. It starts well, smelling opulent and complex but quickly the brightness fades from the top notes and it becomes sickly, cloying and cheap-smelling.
A horrible, monstrous, synthetic tuberose nightmare. Screechy and scratchy as I've come to expect from this brand.
I've tested all of the Ex Nihilo range, and for such an abundance of perfumes, there's basically nothing that pushes the limits. They like to take a tried and tested idea, and make it with a fine precision, no rough edges. All of their perfumes are strong, and this is no exception. They all also have prominent synthetic woody amber bases, which I guess is challenging, but not in a way I find interesting, rather they bum me out and start to grate on me over the long course of the drydown. This here is a competent, polished spin on a very hackneyed men's designer formula. It's fine, but that's it, just fine. I'd probably have thought more highly of it ten to fifteen years ago just before this scent profile became so prolific.
