Very slightly cat pissy (blackcurrant?), minty opening, thyme, and of course as it's a Guerlain, it's very sweet. The sweetness sort of ruins it for me, as it veers away from being fresh, which is how I'd prefer this type of scent to come across. There's aldehydes too, which could possibly save it a bit. I need to see where this goes but for now it's a dud for me, especially from this expensive prestige line.
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.
A photorealistic evocation of wading through wet, knee high wild vegetation immediately after a heavy shower of rain. Wild mint is especially promiment, and there's the dank smell of earth underneath it all. The scent is a little bitter and very, very green.
This scene established, it doesn't develop so much as fade to a pleasant earthy, grassy vetiver base that has definite echoes of Terre d'Hermes. This lasts an absolute age on my skin, though vetiver generally does last an eternity on me anyway, so its longevity will very much depend upon your akin chemistry, I guess.
So a perfume of two parts: the first is very striking, the second, less so, though both are very agreeable. I just wish the originality of the opening had been carried through to the drydown.
Resinous high church incense, a little bit boozy, as though the priest has been hitting the bottle immediately before communion. There's something hay-like mixed in, along with mandarin and lemon and an astringent ivy note, reminiscent of the one in Beach Hut Man. As it settles, a strong cedar emerges, and as does frankincense, along with a fairly light vetiver-patchouli combo. It's a monastery in the Mediterranean somewhere, inland, at twilight on a very still day. As it dries down, it loses some of its distinctiveness, and there's that common ambery drydown shared by so many other incense-heavy perfumes.
This is the first perfume from La Manufacture I've sampled. Looking at the rest of their line, they appear to specialise in riffs on well-known perfumes. If so, I've no idea what this one is a variation of. Nor what the concentration might be: what I can say is my skin has an oily glaze after spraying this, which suggests the concentration of perfume oils must be quite high. It's also pretty powerful: a couple of sprays of this is plenty.
What it is though, is pretty good. There's enough sweetness and shapness not to make this solely a head shop bomb, or be overly reminiscent of a priest swinging a thurible with enough burning incense to set off the fire alarms. There's nothing here that's revolutionary, but it's very well executed with decent-quality ingredients, with enough callbacks and surprises to avoid linearity. Worth hunting out, especially when bottles often turn up heavily discounted on online stores.
You are drinking a cup of cold, black tea while sitting on a wooden bench situated on the edge of a pine forest. Alongside you, a hippie is eating a big slice of heavily-herbed pizza. His clothes are impregnated with the smell of incense.
Light, understated and very pleasant, but frankly not a great deal more than that. It wafts away inconspicuously and every now and again you'll catch a whiff and think, "Oh, that smells nice." What I'd hoped and expected from the note listing though was to be wowed, and this didn't come anywhere near that. This had nearly been a blind buy, but I'm very glad I opted for a sample instead. All a bit meh, really.
Celebrity scents? They're usually a bit meh, let's be honest. Slap a celeb name on the front, design a crowd-pleaser with DNA stolen from whatever is popular on the market at the moment, and flood high street shops with bottles in hope of attracting the eye of the casual fragrance buyer.
Occasionally, a really good one somehow slips through. GIRL was formulated by Comme des Garcons with heavy input from Pharrell Williams, and packaged in an eye catching bottle designed by KAWS. And then it bombed. Far from the ten millon it was hoped the perfume would generate, it was available through online discounters at a fraction of the original asking price, faster than a dud single slips down the charts.
Their loss is your gain. It's really rather good, if not crowd-pleasing (therein lying its downfall).
At first, this is mostly violet, intensely peppery , coupled with lavender to give it an additional boost. That opening is very strong: it's the most violetly violet scent you could imagine, as though Farenheit had coupled with Grey Flannel and produced a monstrous, mutant offspring.
The violet lessens in intensity but always remains present, though gradually other notes join the mix: primarily iris, vetiver and cedar. What it lacks is the lighteness and airiness I mentally always associate with a CDG scent. It's also fairly linear, though you presume that, when you have Antoine Lie as one of the perfumers, this is a deliberate choice.
Would I have paid the full asking price for this when it was first released? It's difficult to say. But it is a perfume I wear often, and with pleasure. At the vastly reduced cost that this can be picked up for though, it's a bit of a no-brainer.
As a child, when Saturday morning cartoon shows were still a thing, I used to watch a series called Arabian Knights, a short-lived and cheesy Hannah Barbera show about Arabian adventurers foiling rather faceless baddies in some unspecified desert location that bore an uncanny resemblence to Monument Valley. Invariably, there were displays of magic and the inevitable flying carpet.
That's what the opening of Shazam reminds me of. It's bright and fruity and full of primary colours. This quickly turns to a lulling amber. It's very well blended so individual notes are hard to pick out, though vanilla, a creamy frankincense and patchouli are especially prominent. And is that a whiff of basil? Not a million miles away from other middle-eastern themed perfumes, but it's very well done, though it veers a little on the sweet side for my taste. Its downfall lies in its longevity, gone a in a few hours bar the faintest of skin scents, so frequent reapplications are necessary.
PDM Layton clone. Spiced apple pie laced with caramel sauce and with a sideserving of vanilla ice cream. After wolfing it down, you become aware of the very pungent vase of flowers placed on your table. Also, you feel a little sick.
Notoriously housed in one of the most awkward bottles known to man, with a cap that seems expressly designed to lift the sprayer off when it is removed, how you react to this fragrance will very much depend upon you react to Layton, this being as close an approximation of the original as you are likely to get at this price point.
The first time I wore this, I was really quite impressed, in a "that smells nice" sort of way. The second time, the faults in the scent profile became apparent: it blankets you in a nauseatingly sweet fog that becomes increasingly intolerable, and is the very definition of a scrubber. Which I did, at the very first opportunity.
That said, it's very well done for what it is, and if this is your sort of scent profile, it's worth hunting out.
It’s an aquatic that doesnt smell like a typical blue fragrance. I’ve received more compliments on this than any fragrance I’ve worn in years.
The first time I smelt Jacomo de Jacomo, I honestly thought it was the most amazing perfume I had encountered. A clove-heavy lavender bomb, marinated in an ashtray with a soapy-woody drydown. There's the bitterness of gabalnum, a hint of florals and of incense thrown into the mix too.
Now, older and supposedly more mature, I know there are much better fragrances out there. But you know what? It still smells pretty good. In some ways it's the epitome of a 1980s scent, a powerhouse designed to both merge with and cut through a smoke-laden bar or nightclub. Now that times have changed, the reformulation is weaker, to the point that longevity could be more persistent. With that caveat, it wears its age very well, and it now slips comfortably into the category of a classic middle-aged man's perfume. Proof, I suppose, that its audience has grown older with it, and its demographic shifted in the process. No reason someone younger couldn't wear this though, particularly those in the alternative scenes.
Cheap as chips and designed to make you stand out amidst the plethora of sweet and blue designer scents out there.
A brief smoky opening gives way to a rich sandalwood that is an almost gourmandish toffee, with a layer of apricot running beneath it. That's followed by a warm vetiver, and then sweet cedar. As it dries down, there's a mildly earthy quality that is reminiscent of dry, dusty earth. I don't get the patchouli listed in the notes at all. The apricot remains present throughout.
At first, I really thought I was going to to be something special, but as it progresses, it loses its uniqueness and begins to resemble other fragrances in the 4160 Tuesdays line.
The problem is that that everything in the scent seems sweet, even the vetiver/earthy notes. It's not saccharine, or sugary, more a warm, jammy quality : this is something that seems core to the brand's DNA, and it's not one I'm terribly fond of. I'd be interested to see them coming up with a perfume that avoids it altogether, because that would be much more to my taste. As it is, this one's very pleasant, I enjoy it, but I don't love it.
90s indie kid who models his look on Damon Albarn boasts that one day he will become a famous musician, like his idol. He ends up becoming an overweight checkout operator who smokes too much and who over-applies deodorant while at work, in order to avoid unsightly sweat stains. Before falling asleep at night, he looks back with melancholy nostalgia to the days when he would spend his nights clubbing, MDMA'd off his face, dreaming about the untold possibilities his future might hold.
Oh, how very 90s. By which I mean, you have a very clean, floral citrusy scent offet against a slightly herbal, camphorous note that grows in intensity as the floral notes recede.
Midway, it begins to resemble a classic barbershop creation , with lily and iris taking centre-stage, before finally settling to that oft-made comparison to a newly opened packet of cigarettes. The floral sweetness always remains present, though it fluctuates in intensity.
Some fragrances evoke emotions, some specific scenarios, some just smell nice (or otherwise). This one evokes colours: off-white that slowly turns a powdery blue, then back to white again. It is and isn't of its time: yes, it's pinned to a definite era, but it has qualities that enable it to transcend that. It smells modern, but also classic.
Look, this isn't a scent that changed my world. I don't gasp in gratitude that I've had the opportunity of smelling this during my lifetime. However, it is a very pleasant, evocative dumb reach scent that more than justifies the meagre amount you pay for a bottle.
Discontinued but still available at rock bottom prices online, Stash suffered the fate of being ahead of its time.
What you get: peppery pistachio that veers almost towards dry coconut. A smoky birch richness that reminds me a little of Comme Des Garcons' Black. Light incense. Amber-hued musk. Vetiver. Grapefruit.A very light floral note. Sage. The notes are very distinct and clear.
None of these notes would be out of place in a niche scent, but they were probably too challenging for a mainstream celebrity scent at the time. It's also unisex before it was fashionable, light, dry and resolutely lacking in sickly sweetness.
This must surely be the perfume SJP first proposed when the idea of a perfume with her name was first floated. She was told then that the market wasn't ready, and even when Stash was launched, it turned out it still wasn't ready.
Still, that's your gain, and mine. The fact that you can pick up a bottle for under twenty quid is a proper steal. This is a perfect autumn scent for me, and when I haul it out if storage each year, I'm always surprised but quite how good it is. Shame about the bottle - there's a fair bit of evaporation just from leaving it sitting, and that seems a common issue, from what I read. Still, at this price, it's easy enough to buy a backup bottle, even two.
I expected this to be like CdG Avignon but wow it’s not like it at all. This is really pretty and floral I’m getting jasmine and iris. It becomes a bit sweet with amber notes. I really like this.
What a glorious curiosity this is: an off-kilter gourmond of sorts, but also a fougere, while at the same time it resembles the odd non-perfume scents Comme des Garcons used to specialise in.
It's available as an extrait and EDP. Both produce roughly the same scent but are made from entirely different ingredients.
So it smells of coffee and of cake (a dry, bready cake). It smells of citrus and of florals. It also smells of ointment, of dry, dusty roads, of sweat and of heat. The EDP is a little sweeter, the extrait a little spicier. Some notes emerge more prominently in one as opposed to the other: the EDP has a prominant liquorice smell at one point, for example, and I can smell the dust more clearly in the latter. Oddly, the extrait doesn’t last as long on my skin, though if I had to choose between the two, that's probably the one I would go for. In both instances, and with most of the Chronotope line, the smells retreats and advances when you least expect it, at times seeing to disappear entirely, then suddenly re-emerging with unexpected force
You don't need to know the backstory to appreciate this: which is perfumer Carter Weeks Maddox following the pilgrimage trail of Camino de Santiago de Compostela, not as an act of devotion, but of exorcism, suffering shattered, infected feet and blood poisoning along the way, fed coffee and almond cake, passing through Spain's arid landscapes. Though you can smell all of those things in the finished scent. You can also imagine it as an abstract avante garde concoction, or conjure up your own scenarios to fit the notes provided. Which is the beauty of perfumery, I suppose.
Like all of Chronotope's perfumes, there's a fierce intelligence and intent on display here, but it's not simply an intellectual exercise: you can feel the emotion put into its creation. It's pretty bloody amazing, and it's next on my perfume shopping list, when funds allow. All the Chronotopes I've sampled so far have been real growers, and it's quickly becoming one of my favourite perfume houses.
Vying surely for the most notes listed in any perfume, Al Bashiq is a clone of Spirit of Dubai's Meydan. Which begs the question, can a clone be a clone when it's owned by the same company?
So I'm presuming this is the same formula but composed of cheaper ingredients. That, and they're relying on mass market volumes to provide roughly equivalent profits to their premium version.
So what does it smell like? It's leathery, woody, fruity, with a pine note that gives it a slighty musty, almost medicinal quality. I'm sure there's something almost like coffee in there too. At one point it moves into definite barbershop territory, shifts into sweetly floral incense, then into a dirty, animalic, quite heavy tobacco. All of this is fairly standard middle-eastern fragrance territory, but the multiplicity of ingredients means it shifts focus frequently and unexpectedly, which gives it added interest.
I liked this quite a lot, but ultimately it didn't quite click: it's feels a little muddy and unfocussed overall, and I wonder if the presumably less expensive materials are responsible for this. It certainly feels as though there's a really stunning perfume waiting to be unleashed, but that never really arrives. A special note of displeasure for the tacky faux-metal eagle lid, which distinctly marks it as the sort of thing you'd see on display in a bargain basement shop: that went in the bin straight away. I'd be really interested to smell the original to see if it manages to cohere in a way this never quite does for me.
