Latest User Reviews

Absolutely stunning if you like smelling like root beer, which I personally adore. There’s a lovely, subtle almost licorice note that is just so beautiful with the vanilla base. I adore this version of the poison line!

Juicy cherries skewered and dipped in smokily scorched toffee. The snack of dreams to go with your fragrantly steaming hot chocolate as you wander around a Viennese Christmas market. Cheerily decorated wooden huts, glittering brass band oompah-ing, golden lights gleaming against the snow——all present and correct.

Serge Lutens Datura Noir, as far as noir-anything goes, is not noir at all. This is a milk glass fairy spell, cast in the delicate light of dawn, calling for pale blossoms soaked in milk at midnight. Heady aromas of honeysuckle and heliotrope combine with buttery floral vanilla fantasies, a flittering whimsy of bitter almond dream fuel, and a diaphanous reverie of powdery coconut musk. This datura-inspired fragrance is less deadly devil’s flower-induced euphoric hallucinations and more moonflower pudding for sleepy Thumbelinas.

Scorpio Rising from Eris Perfumes begins as a cool, citrusy pink pepper with rosy nuances, an artful enigma of a spice, more zingy herbal aromatic than the sting and pungent bite than you might expect. This is one of the more restrained Scorpios I’ve known, and while I don’t mean to generalize I can say that in my experience, there are two types of Scorpios: the one that is Very A Lot, they don’t hold back, you always know what they are thinking and they practically flay themselves open for you. They want you to have all of them, even and especially the ugly and scary bits. They wear their shadow side on their sleeve and their shadows aren’t very subtle, either. The other kind of Scorpio is not exactly secretive, silent-type, but their shadows are shrewd and sharp and you might not get to see them right away, but you always recognize they are there and you are inexplicably drawn to them like a moth to flame. While I am absolutely obsessed with pretty much all Scorpios, I think Eris’ Scorpio Rising falls more into the latter category and I wouldn’t automatically mark it as a bombastically passionate although I would say it has a quiet intensity that sort of sneaks up on you. After the cool, dry floral, and discreet fruitiness of the opening, there emerges delicate smoke and soft leather, woody-floral cardamom and immortelle’s elusive burnt sugar musk. This is the Scorpio you follow down shadowy corridors in a dream, following their lingering trail of scent, and when you’ve reached the dead-end abyss, the void at the end of the trail, you find they were behind you all along. This is the Scorpio that takes your hand as you jump into the darkness of the unknown.

August Picnic, 1976 from DSH Perfumes is an elusive and ephemeral splash of zesty, effervescent, subtly sweet-tart strawberry lemonade joie de vivre on a summer day when the grass is blindingly green and tall enough to tickle your knees and the sun hangs golden above the cedars, not even the barest whisper of winter in its shade—the joyous and wistful and fleeting perfume of an idyllic June afternoon.

I've recently been sampling several perfumes from Meo Fusciuni. So far, these are all introspective, quiet creations--nothing bold or bombastic, but they're all really lovely, and I get the sense from interviews and the way shop keeps and other perfumers talk about him that he is a thoughtful, elegant, and articulate fellow.

Because I agonize over these things, I wonder if he might be bummed out (or maybe, hopefully, elated?) to read a review wherein someone compares his Spirito offering to a less sleazy, more delicate and pensive Drakkar Noir?

Ok, some context. I love Drakkar Noir. I always have. My high school boyfriend used to wear it, and I found it rather swoony. In retrospect, I am realizing that I wanted it to be a swoony fragrance FOR ME. I wanted to smell like a villainous rascal reeking of peppery-woody-musky fougère! And somehow --just today!-- I am realizing that I have been drawn to various iterations of this combination of notes all throughout my journey with perfume.

When I smelled Spirito this morning, I thought, "Gosh! This is like Drakkar Noir leveling up after 12 lifetimes, and it's finally stopped being the skeeziest guy at titty bars. It mediates and keeps a journal, and it'll listen with intent when you talk now, and it'll ask you if you want venting space or solution space. It's sensitive and self-aware. Maybe even a little wistful and ruminative.

In reviewing their various compositions, it looks like they don't have an awful lot in common. Just angelica, lavender, vetiver, and cedar. Maybe the interplay between the notes creates some kind of connection for me, I don't know. But I'm sticking with it. Spirito is a poetry-reading, contemplative Drakkar Noir whose roguish heart, it turns out, is just as fragile and hopeful, just as much as a dreamer as mine.

Meo Fusciuni, I mean no offense or insult! I adore Drakkar Noir, and as far as I am concerned, it is legendary. And Spirito took it (or my memory of it) to task and turned it into something softer, lovelier, and better.

Fiery Pink Pepper from Molton Brown opens with so much promise, a zesty dust storm of dry citrus peel and pith, ginger’s tangy effervescent spice, and some underlying rosy-peppery woody notes. It rapidly becomes a somewhat predictable smelling woody cologne that is somehow also aquatic, but both aspects are equally lackluster. It’s that bubbly, vivacious new acquaintance that when you get to know them, you realize that they don’t actually have any interests or passions and they don’t have much of an internal life. Fun for a very short time, but it’s no one you are ever going to have a deep or lasting connection with. This fragrance is the essence of that person--what little essence they might have, anyway-- distilled and bottled

I purchased Shay & Blue Cotton Flower because I thought it might be similar to a scent I am very fond of: Bath and Body Works Clean Cotton Blossom which then became Sea Island Cotton and which is now Fresh Cotton, but is perhaps not even available anymore? I loved the idea of that scent because it always conjured a sort of Anne of Green Gables Gunne Sax feeling for me, like cottagecore pre-whenever people started referring to it as cottagecore. Cotton Flower is less bleachy and screechy than any of the B&BW iterations; it doesn’t have that harsh lemony lily of the valley cleaning product aspect. It’s a bit woodier and muskier and warmer, with a golden nectarine glow, which is not to say it’s fruity, but it’s got a rather peachy-coral-vermillion-emberglow YouTube vaporwave neon sunset version of the scent of something like a nectarine.

The opening for me is a smack of plasticky rubber, thankfully that doesn’t last too long, only a couple of minutes on my skin, but behind that..

The fresh citrusy resins with their warmth and spice are almost mouthwatering, complemented by the fragrant and spicy peppers.

Fresh juicy resins is a new thought for me lol

The warm fuzzy suede, and the creamy indulgent vanilla hold the fort. The vanilla is realistic as it should be. Somewhere between sweet and savoury.

A really sexy alluring scent.

Firstly the bottle is just gorgeous, shame I have to hide it away but light is not a friend to fragrance!

There is a comforting creaminess that marries with the sharpness of the lime which makes this special to me. And then when the citrus notes disappear the spice comes through on my skin.

I find it uplifting and calming and as the weather is pretty rubbish in the UK right now I find myself reaching for it more and more

Disclaimer: This is a part of Le Labo's City Collection & is more expensive than their usual frags

True to the city it represents, Gaiac 10 is an embodiment of Tokyo — it's minimalistic yet complex, will remind you of nature & at the same time Gaiac 10 is a very metropolitan fragrance.

This is a very straightforward fragrance: it smells of guaiac and cedarwood, from the top note to the drydown. But don't be fooled, as you smell yourself throughout the day, the sweetness of musk and incense compliments the woody notes and it makes the fragrance just irresistible.

I'm quite certain that the nose who composed this scent had no actual concept of sin either in theory or practice. This is a creamy white floral grounded with a light woody musk and it's one of those pleasantly inoffensive scent that one might spritz when they don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about their perfume. If your idea of sin is wearing white after Labor Day or not properly sorting your recyclables, this may hit right for you. If the imp of the perverse lives permanently on your shoulder, you may think this is laughable but you keep it in your cabinet because you love the cheesy gothic melodrama of the bottle

I love most incarnations of myrrh and this is a really nice one. Its bittersweet, medicinal edge is tempered by the tonka, and tonka's earthy sweetness is reigned in by the inclusion of the aromatic herbal crispness of lavender. There's the barest tinge of something smoky and acrid, which calls to mind imagery of blazing, blackened amber, and yet this is a very cool scent, and I don't get a feeling of warmth from it at all. It makes me think of the sadly discontinued Sonoma Scent Studio Ambre Noir, a fragrance that goes hard with the smoky amber, so maybe this could be a possible, though less extreme, dupe.

I first sampled Montale's Cafe Intense years ago when I was initially getting into fragrance and perfumes. I guess I was feeling a little nostalgic for that sample a kind MUA-er sent me way back when! My recollection was that it was meant to be a coffee-forward scent, but...it is not. My partner observed that it smells like a teenage girl who typically wore a lot of candied, sugary scents and who wanted to level up with fancy florals and didn't quite hit the mark. She tried, I guess, was his conclusion. My thoughts are more specific. This is a cloying fruity-floral that smells exactly like Rose Jam from LUSH, which I bitterly loathe because that smells just like those gaggy sweet Jolly Ranchers hard candies that all the popular kids were always eating in 6th grade. Which in turn makes me think of the MOST popular girl, we'll call her Mary Lesa H., who broke off and ATE part of my sugar crystal science project that year. I hate science projects and I have never forgiven Mary Lesa H., and this awful perfume can go straight to hell.

Musc Maori from Pierre Guillaume Paris is another one that I tried a long while ago and wanted to revisit, and it's just as quietly weird as I remember. It's got milky vanilla notes of cumaru wood, which I had to look up just now, and Google tells me that basically, it's where tonka beans come from. It also features appearances by coffee tree blossom and cacao pod. I typically don't love chocolate scents, but this is like a musky, musty, ghostly packet of Swiss Miss. I say ghostly because it's a very transparent scent, and the musk alternates eerily between something etherous in spirit and warm, sweet human skin. This is not the finished cup of hot chocolate but rather the grains of cocoa trembling in the tablespoon before being stirred into the boiling milk. It's an odd but thoroughly charming fragrance.

Geisha Noire from Aroma M is a scent I first encountered via Makeup Alley, in 2004 when I was beginning my fragrance journey and spent a lot of time on the site's forums. It was a thrilling experience swapping scent samples with strangers, but the kind of strangers with whom you were slowly making kindred connections and forming, in some instances, marvelous friendships that last many years. I have hoarded my tiny vial ever since that time and finally bought a full bottle last week. Geisha Noire is an intense, golden amber and smoky somber tonka that's rich and hypnotic but before it veers too far into gourmand territory, you encounter an unexpected edge of leather and salt that keeps interesting and not so easily categorized.

I've only tried a few Commodity fragrances and own even less. The issues I have with Moss, the one I actually have, are emblematic of most of the others I've sampled as well.  They're crisp in the sense that mostly what you get is the acrid, antiseptic zest of rubbing alcohol, and they're generically cologne-y, in a plastic-y green, waxy citrus way that reminds me of every mediocre dude who talks over you in a department meeting and takes credit for your ideas, every tedious bore at a party who suggests that you're misinformed and that you should read the work of a certain subject matter expert --and news flash ya ding dong, I'm the one who wrote the work you're referencing-- and lastly, every creeper who crawls out from his cave to follow you down the street shouting HEY GIRL NICE TATS and then calls you an ugly whore when you politely request that he leave you alone. Pretty sure all of these assholes are Commodity's focus groups.

Ambre Narguilé from the Hermes Hermessence line gets a lot of apple pie references from reviewers, but I don’t get that myself. A spiced compote, perhaps. Dried fruits–raisins and plums, stewed in honey and rum and cinnamon, and left on the stove very nearly too long. It’s been cooked down to a syrupy essence of its former self, and if you hadn’t pulled it from the flame, the caramelized sugars might have started to smoke and burn. I don't love sweet fragrances, but come October I crave this one; it calls to mind a reading firelight a book you've experienced a million times (like the Secret History by Donna Tartt which I only just read but I loved it so much I'm ready to go at it again) while wearing a cozy oversized cardigan with thick cables and toggle buttons and that you probably inherited from your grandpa. Not to be confused with that awful cardigan in Taylor Swift's video. ugh, Don't get me started on that. That's another conversation for another midnight.

Heresy is the sharp green metallic floral of violet leaf, mingled with cool aromatic cedar, lofty sandalwood, and the smoked leather notes of vetiver; elements which alchemize into the austere elegance and kindred glooms of a dry, peppery violet incense. If you like the dark ambiance and nocturnal aesthetic of dungeon synth coupled with spectral visionary Simon Marsden's black and white photographs of haunted ruins and moonlit abbeys, this is a transportive scent that will spirit you away to those eerie, ominous realms.

Utterly sublime oud. Has bonkers longevity and sillage but it’s so well made that it isn’t over powering or too much.

I can’t recommend it enough. Even if you don’t normally like oud you should try this. It’s intoxicating and just sneaks up on you as you’re going about your day.

every time I wear it I always think about how amazing I smell 😝

The opening is a beautiful sweet apple tobacco, and the liquorice is prominent.

There is definitely a similarity to Angel’s Share, but it’s still different enough.

The liquorice note reminded me of the Legacy of Petra from Penhaligon‘s. I don’t care for LoP I find it too cloying, but the liquorice here works beautifully and gives structure and contrast to the sweetener notes, along with the sage

The vanilla smooths and rounds everything out.

A really sex frag. Smooth and alluring without being overpowering.

An interesting one for sure.

Citrus, aromatic, and almost leaning savoury, presuming thats the immortelle and very dry saffron.

A cheap plasticky leather being created on a metal table in a laboratory.

Sterile, cold, yet warm and fragrant.

The woods are dry and fragrant.

The are elements that remind me of Secretions Magnifique. The cool metallic sterility with the lingering florals. Ganymeade However leans away from any lactonic or coppery metallics.

Feminité du Bois, the first Lutens fragrant creation that is still with with us. And what an absolute pleasure it is. It’s name breaking the preconceptions about woody scents only being for men. And it’s scent breaking the boundaries of what is expected of a woody fragrance, by the introduction of (dried) fruits.

It‘s dry cedar notes and fruity plum combined effortlessly. In an almost abstract way, though not quite.

It also features a lesser talked about animalic note, it enhances the purple fruity notes, without being overbearing.

Originally released under the Shiseido brand under the same name and av today under the Serge Lutens brand.

A scent every fragrance lover should get his or herself familiar with.

i wear this in the evenings when I‘m home as it find it very relaxing and comforting. It’s a cosy,clean fragrance. feels like you’ve just got out of the shower or got fresh sheets on.

Really affordable and lovely. Something I think everyone would like, the bottle is beautiful. It’s just a classic and timeless scent.