Mystique Bouquet (Afnan)

"The 1960s Called and Wants its Catherine Deneuve Back . . ."

I'm told there's a bit of a backstory as to how this fragrance was created, something about Quentin Bisch winning so much with Ex Nihilo's Fleur Narcotique (2014) that Parfums de Marly asked him to self-flatter in the original Valaya (2023). But how Imran Fazlani's 2024 creation fits into that situation is beyond me. I've gleaned that these fragrances represent a newer style of florals unique to the '20s. At least, that's the take on Fragrantica. My take is different. In any case, Mystique Bouquet smells a lot like Valaya in the first two minutes—like, a lot. But then it goes even further in a surprising direction.

There are some clones out there where you smell them and tell yourself, okay, this smells like fragrance X in the top and mid, but the base is totally different. Then there's clones where you smell the original and then smell the dupe, and you're like, Christ, there's no point in wearing the original anymore. Enter Mystique Bouquet: Fazlani took the intensely synthetic dryer-sheet musk explosion of Valaya and reinterpreted its chemical cacophony as a French chypre from the 1900s with a contemporary sheen of Ambroxan. At heart, the scent structure here is the sort of thing a sexy French woman in 1967 woud wear, and the old-school feel shimmers through in a very classical, wonderful way. But that's not the only thing that grabs me about it. My heart opens to Mystique Bouquet in its first hour, because that's when I get hit in the face by a massive wallop of regular 'ol oakmoss. And the kicker is it's not even listed on the box (although it does appear in the pyramid).  

When you've worn as many fragrances as I have, you know that oakmoss has a lung feel to it. There's a body and heft to it that can sometimes impart a heaviness to the air you breathe. It's here in this fragrance, and enough of it that I know it can't possibly be IFRA compliant. It isn't some hypoallergenic version of oakmoss. It's vintage Mitsouko-moss. Combined with an intensely radiant bergamot/peach accord, a bleached bouquet of squeaky-clean white florals, cistus labdanum, a big grassy-green note, and a salty base of multilayered white musks, Mystique Bouquet far outdoes Valaya (piss poor in comparison) for roughly a quarter of the price. Plus it comes in a gorgeous bottle and box, so kudos to Afnan for once again blowing me away on all fronts in the quality department. 

Lecture Time: How Olivier Creed's Death Hits the Fragcomm, & What His Legacy Gives Us . . .

Park Your Carcass, Kid. I'd Like A Word.

Olivier Creed died about a week ago from an undisclosed cause, and this hit me. My first thought upon learning of his passing was, do people realize what he gave us? 

I'd like to take a moment to cut through the bullshit that has surrounded Olivier Creed and his brand for decades now. It kind of started after Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez published The Guide (2008) and insinuated in not-so-opaque language that Creed was a fraud. With snarky reviews and faint praise for even established classics like Green Irish Tweed and Bois du Portugal, the duo's appraisal amounted to an indictment of quality and character that to this day feels spiteful, mean-spirited, and unjustified. 

After The Guide, it became de rigeur to act like you were "too good" for Creed fragrances. In January of 2014, The Candy Perfume Boy wrote:

"I have a turbulent relationship with the house of CREED. They are definitely on the pricey side for what they are and their quality can be a bit hit or miss, but it would be unfair to say that none of their scents are worth seeking out."

This left me rolling my eyes. Then, a few years later, I read his river of glaze for Prerogative, the Britney Spears celebuscent. His fawning over her and the fragrance made me think he was taking the piss. It would be "unfair" to say none of the Creeds are worth seeking out. Why, thank you, Candy Perfume Boy, how genteel of you to admit Creed into your teeny-bopper club. I suppose one can find solace in knowing that knife-wielding, raccoon-eyed Britney Spears—yes, that's your girl—calms your turbulence. 

But it wasn't just the Candy Perfume Boy. Every other blogger had some dismissive or trite word for Olivier and his fragrances. There was always a gripe: price too high (yet just fine for far clunkier brands like Maître Parfumeur et Gantier and Etat Libre d'Orange), marketing a lie (and nobody bats an eyelash when Parfums de Marly staples a wizened date on its masthead), or inspiration too dry (Green Irish Tweed is very old-school, but Mitsouko, well, Mitsouko . . . ), there was always a reason to crap on Creed. 

So let's cut the bullshit. Was Guerlain a god-seed brand, as Luca Turin is wont to characterize it? For the 20th century, particularly the first 60 years, yes. But times change. Tastes shift. And in the final chapter of the millennium, it wasn't Jean-Paul Guerlain who permanently shifted the direction of masculine perfumery for the 21st century. It was Olivier Creed. Not Pierre Bourdon. Olivier. Creed.

Let's get something straight here. The perfume industry isn't just about the perfumer. Creativity is a driving but also distracting force, and when dealing with things as delicate and temperamental as scent and its finest finesses, it takes an evaluator to recognize the winning timbre, and a businessman to put it in people's hands. Olivier Creed delivered on both counts. The suits at Lancôme weren't smart enough to recognize the genius in Bourdon's submission for Sagamore? Had it ended there, Green Irish Tweed would not exist. It was Creed's commiseration with the jilted perfumer that brought it to life. The fragrance went from "green beans" (Chantal Roos, YSL) to masterpiece. Olivier looks bad? Imagine being YSL right now. Jazz is discontinued, and was never nearly as popular as its close contemporaries, GIT and Cool Water. Do the math.

What Gabe Oppenheim left out of his clumsily-written book, The Ghost Perfumer: Creed, Lies, & The Scent of the Century (2021), even as he derided Olivier for "stealing" the formula, is that Pierre Bourdon never came up with dusky ambergris in the base. 

That's Creed's signature accord. It's what makes GIT. It is, more than perhaps any other contemporary perfume of the last 50 years, a fragrance about the base. And I'm not talking the post-2013 reformulations of GIT that gradually stripped out the sandalwood and natural ambergris tinctures. I'm talking the 1990s and 2000s formula, which I've smelled, and which boasted the richest, smoothest sandalwood base I have ever encountered in a perfume, including Guerlain's classics—and it isn't particularly close. Even Turin had the decency to at least grudgingly admit the fragrance was brilliant. 

Oppenheim, by the way, characterizes Creed's adjustments to Bourdon's formula as "modified, because Olivier would sometimes take the ingredients Pierre recommended and replace them with the most expensive version of those ingredients," a rare devotion to quality for the consumer summed up with: "Olivier had no idea how to meet a perfumer's budget but he couldn't have cut costs even if he'd wanted to, according to a [conveniently anonymous] source." His sentence doesn't even make much sense, but I glean from it that Oppenheim believes Bourdon's formula was at risk in Creed's hands. 

So, in cutting the bullshit, no, Pierre Bourdon is not the only perfumer who created Green Irish Tweed. He supplied the original formula, and with that there is no argument. But Creed then took the original formula, and subsequent iterations, and figured out which one worked. He then crafted the specific base, by choosing the specific base materials over the recommendations of Bourdon (excluding him from that particular process) and fitted it to the novel, post-Drakkar Noir opening and gusty-floral heart of the scent. Clearly, by Oppenheim's own account, Olivier had a heavy hand in the making of Green Irish Tweed, and why wouldn't he? Creeds of that era all shared the "Creed Water" base, comprised of a precarious balance between natural ambergris, salty-synthetic ambergris, expensive musks, subtle florals, and precious woods. 

To a degree, Olivier Creed was a perfumer. In keeping with my cut-the-bullshit approach to the man, I'd like to point out that there were perfumes that he solely authored. Its isn't clear exactly which (accounts differ), but if you know enough Creeds, you can spot which among the complex masterpieces smell relatively "minor," and make an educated guess. I'd hazard that Tabaróme Millésime and Love in Black are Olivier creations. To my knowledge there have been no attributions to the contrary (not that the brand is very forthcoming) and Tabaróme smells like a proto-Bleu fragrance with little more than ginger, citrus, green tea, a dab of hay-bale coumarin, and amber comprising its lithe structure, frankly smelling like the work of a man who "dabbles" in the art without actually committing to it. Likewise, in LiB, the overall feel is of a fragrance made by someone who took a 20th century violet toilet water and simply amped it up with the best violet and irone materials money can buy. Another trademark of Creed's personal style: simple elegance that frankly any amateur with an unlimited budget could pull off.

I won't eulogize Mr. Creed here, because I did not know him personally. The man's many foibles are on record, and I recognize them for what they were. Yes, he fibbed in the marketing copy. As does literally every other market manager for a niche perfume brand. And no, it has never been established that Olivier fabricated his family's history in the perfume industry. There was no perfume industry in Creed's salad years, so logically (and yes logic eludes Creed critics on this point) there is no way to disprove or verify Olivier's claims to family formulas and centuries of parfumeur lineage. Bespoke perfumery typically leaves literal record-keeping breadcrumbs, and until someone proffers a convincing explanation as to how Olivier was able to create a hit-after-hit range of impeccably—and classically—tailored Grey Cap EDTs, (and no, one does not pull that many beautiful fragrances out of his ass), they are the only breadcrumbs to follow. 

My observation of how Olivier Creed's death has impacted the community is filled with sadness. Yes, there are numerous farewells that acknowledge the beauty Creed brought into our world, and their sentiments are noted with warmth. However, the staccato of Gen-Zombie insults peppers the condolences with a salt of nastiness unlike anything I've ever seen before. What the hell is wrong with you people? This one dimwit who goes by the moniker "gezakolab" continuously harangues the Fragrantica obit with senseless comments about how Olivier "scammed all his life." 

Social justice keyboard warrioring against a dead man because you read a crappy book is just pathetic. Despite others imploring him to recognize that there's a time and place, he had to keep adding his digs. 

Then there's "50shadesofscent," another loser, who writes, "We let him rest, we just don't care about him" . . . which is a weird and ugly thing to say when someone has just died. I mean, it's a take. If you don't care about him, then . . . what are you doing in the comments of the Fragrantica obit for him? What have you, anonymous keyboard warrior, contributed to the fragrance world that qualifies your opinion of Olivier Creed in death over that of his hundreds of thousands of fans? Name one thing. But you won't, because you're a disgusting little turd who hides her face behind an avatar and an ugliness, the only things you can show the world, or what little of it wants to see you. 

There have been some readers of mine who have messaged me privately to applaud my stance on Creed and the company as a whole, and they have rightly pointed out that nobody has ever just said the thing with receipts to show for it: Olivier Creed stole people's intellectual property and defrauded them of millions of dollars over the course of his career. If you want to say that, just say it. Stop hiding behind snarky innuendo, dismissive attitudes, acting like you're above appreciating a brand because you heard some random things that you've chosen to believe. Everybody says stuff like, "Creed stole the formula . . . aaaand he edited it and inserted expensive materials, and evaluated multiple iterations of the formula (because he was an amazing evaluator), and then decided this was the one he would release, this fragrance that has sold hundreds of thousands of bottles over 40 years, and nobody could legally stop him because, well, nobody wanted to." 

There have also been readers of mine who have cited Oppenheim's recalling of Bourdon's testimony to him. Bourdon does, according to Oppenheim, outright state that Olivier Creed stole from him. But the question is, how exactly did Bourdon put that? Was it a casual French quip made by a quirky elderly perfumer who was obsessed with the dihydromyrcenol-fueled violet/iris profile of GIT, and to an even greater extent, Cool Water? Or was it really the teary-eyed regret-filled rant of someone who feels deeply wronged, and if so, where is the follow-up to that? Where is the meat on the bones of "Creed stole from me" that any wronged perfumer would gladly hand up? Nowhere in Oppenheim's book does Bourdon say anything like, "Olivier Creed stole my formula, and here's how hard I tried to make things right." 

No. In fact, Bourdon's testimony recollects the opposite: after supposedly getting ripped off with GIT, he did the obvious thing for revenge and offered the cheater Silver Mountain Water and Millésime Impérial as well, allowing Olivier to steal from him twice more and continue "scamming" the public. 

Make it make sense. 

Olivier Creed's legacy is rich and grossly underrated. While people like Luca Turin bang on about the dusty and casually-glossed-over antisemitic legacies of the Guerlains and Chanels, Olivier Creed, who has fundamentally shaped the modern perfume landscape in ways that are too numerous to count (there would be no Sauvage if Aventus had not been commissioned), goes relatively neglected and unnoticed. You can always tell when someone has never smelled Green Valley, for instance. They'll mourn the loss of Samsara, and opine on the beauty of 31 Rue Cambon, and then say something like, "Oh, Creed? Eh." Nobody who has ever seriously worn Green Valley has ever said "Eh" about Creed.

Olivier leaves us Green Valley, the finest fragrance I have ever encountered, as well as a bevy of other, mostly older fragrances, many of which are now discontinued. The IFRA was the final nail in classical Creed's coffin, securing draconian regulatory liens against the production of practically every Grey Cap Creed and the earliest stabs at the "Millésime" range, before it was a thing. I'm nursing a bottle of vintage 2005 Fleurissimo, which today smells like a bouquet of heavily-salted tuberose, because it was the one Creed that Olivier would hold up in advertising photos, glad to let the sunlight glint like gold from its yellow-hued liquid. Fleurissimo is another flawless example of what Creed offered us in his legacy, that rarest of things: a commitment to giving the customer the very best, no expense spared. How many founding fathers of major niche brands think that way today? Precious few. 

People bitch about profit being the sole driving force behind many of today's releases, and they're not wrong; the perfume industry of the '20s is hellbent on taking ethyl-maltol and ethyl-vanillin and slapping $250 tags on them. They forget that back in the late 1960s, there was a young man who wanted to drive up his own margins to nearly-unbearable levels, just so his customers could feel like they were wearing something unique, unforgettable, special. Scoff if you want to, that's fine. But the day will come when some teenager will happen across a bottle of unused and untouched Fleurissimo, and after one wearing will hit the Reddit boards and bro forums to ask, unironically, "Why don't any of my girlfriend's perfumes smell this good?" 

The silence in response will be deafening.

One Man Show Emerald Edition (Jacques Bogart)

One of the neat things about being a collector is finding "rare" items, and perfume collectors are especially driven by scarcity. I've been on the lookout for One Man Show Emerald Edition since its release 8 years ago, but for whatever reason it's always been tough to source. Apparently Emerald was initially a Dubai exclusive, then trickled into Europe, and eventually got swept into the grey market, which the Bogart Group uses to unofficially distribute its wares to the continent. Recently a few inexpensive bottles appeared on eBay, and I was on it. 

Emerald Edition is an unusual one. Corinne Cachen has been in the game for a while now, and has at least one foot in the "old-school" world of green, spicy-woody frags. See Montblanc Presence (2001) and Avon Surreal Garden (2007) for just two mainstream examples. Emerald opens with a lick of sugary sweetness that is swiftly overtaken by a rush of what smells to me like a "sandpaper accord" commonly found in pre-millennium masculines: ginger & white pepper-adjacent elemi resin (150-180 grit), sage (sclarene), and the most bitter rendition of methyl heptine carbonate (violet leaf) Cachen could possibly use. Violet flower appears in an abstract and very contemporary form, resembling Mancera's Aoud Violet a bit for at least twenty minutes or so, but then a potent nutmeg and desiccated coumarin emerge, lending earth-hued shadow to the grey-green fog. Still spicy, a little woody, a little green thanks to the lingering violet/violet leaf aspect, and with that sclarene really piercing through everything, Emerald settles on dusty nutmeg and a dry-resinous tapestry of violet, cedar, salty musks, and Bogart Group's version of Akigalawood.

One thing nobody mentions is there's ethyl maltol in this fragrance. It's blended in so carefully that unless the juice in the atomizer stem was allowed to get old enough (as in my bottle), you won't smell it clearly save for during the first one or two sprays until the stuff balances out. I'll end with this: Emerald Edition is worth seeking out if you're a hopeless lover of green and agrestic masculines from any decade, and if you're okay with smelling like a 51 year-old man who just stepped out of 1997. This particular Bogart won't turn heads or be remembered, but it's definitely a mature and serviceable men's offering, and I'm glad I have it, if only for how hard it is to find these days.

Angham (Lattafa)

This fragrance was a bit of a "hypebeast" phenom for the Reddit and YouTube crowd when it was released in 2024, and continues to enjoy massive popularity with the under-thirty set particularly. Lattafa is a reputable Dubai-based concern known for their florid packaging and commercial success in duping designer and niche brands, and yet Angham is a Lattafa oddity, in that it seems to be its own thing entirely. I find it refreshing to encounter a fragrance by this brand that isn't overwhelmingly duping or modding something else. Sometimes a little originality is needed. 

The hype was based on a widespread perception that Angham was a dupe of Burberry Goddess (2023), with countless influencers rumoring its likeness as being nearly 1:1 with Amandine Clerc-Marie's creation. However, poke a bit deeper into the chattering morass, and you'll find a fair number of people who either unwittingly debunk the comparison, or outright declare that Angham isn't really close to Goddess at all. Having only smelled Angham, it's tough for me to weigh in definitively, but I can say this: Angham does not really match the pyramid or stated impressions of Goddess, from what I can smell. Goddess is apparently a punchy lavender-forward floral that warms into a smooth vanilla base, with hints of cocoa and ginger, while Angham is gingery-citrus with a velvety floral-vanilla drydown. I get a linalool lavender (reconstruction) with a very brief snap of super-light citrus and transparent ginger in the opening accord, which rapidly segues into a nondescript non-gourmand vanilla base, and it's linear for the remaining twelve hours on skin and fabric. Ethyl-maltol is definitely in the mix, as are a blend of woody musks that manage to oscillate between floral and synth-sandalwood, the kind of lizard-brain-says-expensive sweetness that could not offend if it tried. Projection is so-so.

If you're after an undeniably classy crowd-pleasing vanilla perfume, Angham is a solid option, albeit a boring one. I'm sorry, but vanilla is vanilla. Of more interest to me is the marketing angle Lattafa took with this stuff. For one thing, they named it after Egypt's biggest female radio star, which kind of makes Angham a "celebuscent" even if Angham herself has nothing to do with it. The brand leans into this by attaching a chromed metal musical staff imprinted with notes and a G-clef, a design that extends onto the chromed metal cap. Great idea, but one problem—the little square in the center with the fragrance's name makes the whole thing look like a big Band-Aid. The line of the cap's base meeting the bottle even matches the spot where you pull and peel before applying to a minor wound. A textbook case of a good idea badly executed.

Jicky EDP (Guerlain/Les Légendaires Collection)

Let's talk about Jicky. 

Here's the thing.

Jicky's reputation precedes it, and there have been approximately 889,000 internet reviews of Jicky written in the past 26 years. I don't need to get into how Aimé Guerlain created the world's first abstract perfume in 1889 using more than one entirely synthetic material (De Laire's coumarin and vanillin). I don't need to mention that up until very recently, Jicky was the oldest preserved (not hugely fucked with) perfume still available to buy new. Guerlain has apparently discontinued it, but hey, it had a good run. And I really don't need to mention that Jicky holds the original "Guerlinade" that the house would infuse into nearly every major release thereafter. It's an "oriental fougère," the very first of that breed. 

Since I don't need to mention any of that, let's get into the issue I have with Jicky in its latest, and probably last incarnation. I own a bottle of the "Les Légendaires" heart-stoppered EDP, pictured above. This version is, according to Thierry Wasser, Guerlain's master perfumer, a faithful reconstruction of the original 1889 formula, as it would have smelled, vs. how subsequent 20th century reformulations of Jicky smelled. Wasser's angle is that Jicky was animalic, but not that animalic, and was really more about showcasing the two synthetics pioneered by Aimé. Indeed, the fragrance reads to my nose as more fresh than fierce; I'm pleased by the brisk but delicate sunshine-in-the-morning lavender accord that introduces this fragrance, and impressed by how it's couched in gentle brushings of basil and rosemary, the former of which is shockingly evident throughout Jicky's considerable 14+ hour lifespan on skin and fabric. (Was Aimé Italian?)

This all dries very gradually into the base, with barely any heart notes, save for a whisper of nondescript florals that literally breeze into a foundational and everlasting civetone-laced coumarin and vanillin. The coumarin is gentle, hay-like, semisweet and balsamic, the finest and possibly best balanced coumarin that I've ever smelled. Wedded to that is the cushy sweetness of the vanillin, but conjoining the two is that infamous animalic rasp. I'm puzzled by the rasp, because more than a few reviewers seem to find Jicky, even in this formula, borderline unwearable for having too much civet. I, however, sense barely any. It could be my nose, or perhaps it's simply a musk component that jumps out at some noses and not at others, and I'm one of the lucky chosen who can happily wear Jicky. 

Whatever the case may be, it's a tremendously pleasant and enduring fragrance, but my issue with it is that I want the animalic component to be more pronounced. For that matter, I want everything to be more pronounced. "But Bryan," you shout, "This is Jicky, so take it or leave it!" Well, not so fast. It may be that Jicky is set in stone, and it's unreasonable to expect anything but what I get from it. If I want an even brighter, smoother, and more penetrating lavender, I'm out of luck, right? If I find the sedate blush of barnyard hay in its base too evanescent, I can kick rocks, correct? Wrong. I have a fragrance that delivers in these departments, and yet smells about 95% similar to Wasser's Jicky: Ungaro pour L'Homme II (1992). 

Jacques Polge's 1990s entry in the Ungaro masculine line says, "I'm like Jicky, only more so." Bigger, more lucid lavender. Heavier civet, right from the outset. A bold, coumarinic-ambery quality that speaks to more recent contemporaries like Brut, while also nodding to Guerlain. Vanilla, just as restrained, and folded into more tangible wood accords, i.e., rosewood and sandalwood. Ungaro II is the logical reconfiguration of Aimé's 19th century masterpiece. Take all the good ideas, blow them up, rebalance everything to scale, and voila! If you want what Jicky actually smelled like when it was first released, you can now have it. Just don't tell anyone. For all intents and purposes, this is just another in a long line of "fougèriental" masculines pushed into department stores for mass consumption. (Except it's actually an educated remake of the original Jicky . . . don't tell anyone.) 

Wasser can claim that his formula is closest to what Jicky once was, but I'm not entirely buying it. Sure, the fragrance is gorgeous. The lavender is crystalline, the herbal notes are like fine porcelain accords brushed with tender love and care, and the "purr" of animalism in the semisweet base is fun to wear. But the 19th century formulas used more naturals, and probably more real musks. The early forms of coumarin and vanillin were, from what I've read, a bit cruder and louder than the stuff being used today. And if Guerlain wanted people to notice this very first abstract composition—as in, not just representing literal flowers—he would want it to sing. People were stinky in the years before deodorant soap. Perfume was the answer, but it was, by sheer necessity, stern about it.

I encourage you to grab a bottle of Jicky while you still can. It doesn't show up on Guerlain's website, and the rumor is that it's been canned. Who knows if that's true. But I'd also warn you, if you're looking to drop $150+ on a vintage bottle of Jicky: Perhaps take a moment to reconsider. You can spend the same big dollars and buy Ungaro II, and I promise you, you're essentially getting the same fragrance with more balls, and also frankly more dynamism. Ungaro II smells like it contains real civet, although I doubt it does. The current Guerlain does not, that is certain. If you're looking for something like Jicky, but richer, then you're looking for Polge's fragrance. Just be ready to pay for it.

Of course, you could always just buy a vintage, or even "deep" vintage bottle of Jicky, which by many accounts has a much more fecal civet note in it. I could do the same, but my issue there is with Guerlain's unpredictability. This stuff isn't available to sample, especially in vintage form. Finding a truly satisfying vintage means picking through 137 years of formulas, spanning literally dozens of different bottle types, with all sorts of concentrations, and I'd probably have better luck playing lotto tickets. 

Jicky has a superior lavender note, of that there's no doubt. But Ungaro's lavender is pretty damn close, and as I mentioned before, it's brighter, louder, and richer. So, if you're a vintage hound, and you're not sure where to start with Jicky, Ungaro is your one-and-done shortcut. No multiple formulas (Ungaro II had one run), no weird bottles and concentrations to pick through (Ungaro comes only in EDT concentration), and no b.s. with the civet (Ungaro's civet is no joke). I'll let you decide which road to take.  

Victoria (Lattafa)

Basic Victorian Bitch

There's fine perfumery, and then there's Basic Bitch Juice. 

Let me make the distinction: fine perfumery entails the complex and abstract blending of accords that, when conjoined a certain way, create something moving on both a sexual and intellectual level. Think Catherine Deneuve, who mainly wore Mitsouko, and picture her nude in a bathtub in Pola X (1999). Mitsouko = Not that Basic. 

Basic Bitch Juice is bright-fruity meets intense, sugar rush vanilla, followed by six hundred sprays and an influencer vid gushing about the compliments she gets wearing it. Sweet, saccharine, edible, evoking only calories and candy. In other words, even a coma patient would find it agreeable, but nobody finds it particularly interesting.

Such is Lattafa's Victoria. It's trashy in a good way. Often compared to lemon meringue, I think it smells closer to vanilla-frosted shortbread lemon squares baked by a chef with a fondness for ethyl maltol. I smell Victoria and immediately think, "Basic Bitch." 

She never stopped celebrating her "dirty thirty." She shops at Poshmark. Spends $150 a week on Starbucks. Pulls her hair up in severe ponytails all day, every day, instead of just getting a pixie cut. Melts for other people's dogs but shudders at the thought of having children. And she exclusively wears perfumes that smell like cotton candy. It doesn't smell good to her if it isn't identical to what she can stuff in her face and feel guilty about as she goes for seconds. Hell, she's even named Victoria.

With all of that said, I should be fair to Victoria (the perfume); while it won't win awards for originality, it should get noticed for being incredibly well made, and well heeled. The box is studded with leather siding meant to resemble the corinthian style of Victorian fainting couches, and frankly it looks great. The faux marble patina on the box and bottle evoke cold marble staircases and gothic horror. If I didn't know better, I'd look at it and think I was in for a dusty rose chypre. Instead, the fragrance opens with a pert blend of fizzy lemon aldehyde and d-limonene, which I feel leans into an orange character as it dries, with distinct nuances of neroli and petitgrain lending greenness and depth. Maybe a careful dose of something like valencene is in there. Clearly they were going for a Meyer lemon, and they did a fair job. This smells convincingly edible-citrus. 

Eventually, a pastry-like accord shows up, and this is where the fragrance begins to resemble a graham-cracker-crusted lemon square to me. Its subtle florals still wisp along in the background, undergirded by an ever-present ethyl-maltol sugary sweetness that is probably the only annoying aspect of this thing, at least in its first hour. As a creamy vanilla accord wells up in the base, this spun-sugar effect begins to cohere better, and by the five hour mark, it's basically a great big fluffy vanilla with a halo of candied lemon. Projection is modest and longevity is longer than a CVS receipt, so you'll get a work day and then some out of it. Victoria is both fresh and warm, another plus, as it works well in both winter and summer. It's like a splicing of traditional lemon cologne and vanilla cookie candle, or perhaps just the cookies, an unadorned and direct gourmand. 

It does smell good, overall. There's no arguing that. And the floral facets of neroli and petitgrain do inject some much-needed sophistication into an otherwise Basic scent profile. The vanilla is very foody and overly sweet, what with the ethyl maltol and whatever other candy flavoring is in there, and you really have to like gourmands to wear this on a regular basis. Not entirely my thing, but every once in a very blue moon, I get the urge to wear a good vanilla, and Victoria is definitely a good vanilla. To me, personally, it reads as a serviceable post-shave fragrance that strays well over the border of common 20th century citrus-vanilla barbershop tropes, and thus is worth having around. I find it works pretty well with Limacol aftershave/cologne splash, which basically smells like one-note mentholated Meyer lemon (and is severely underrated imo). 

It's a quality perfume, but it leaves me wondering, why? Who briefed this thing? Who woke up one day and said, "Lattafa, you must clone Dolce&Gabbana's Devotion, and put a Caffè Sicilia spin on it!"  Then gussy it up with cod Victoriana and a blue-marbled bottle that looks like a prop from a Roger Corman film. Why, Lattafa? Why? 

Wild Vetiver: Cut The Sh*t, Creed

I can see how this new release by Creed could be considered "great." It smells great in a safe way that borders on generic. It feels pretty good to wear it. It's a very attractive bottle, sort of a proprietary shade of green that I haven't seen elsewhere, save for lime popsicles from the dollar store, the extra-cheap kind that come wrapped in waxy white paper. Even the name is fun, conjuring imagery of unconstrained fields of tall vetiver grasses waving hello as far as the eye can see. It's all good. 

Except Wild Vetiver is a little too close to Eladaria. Same bored, sugared peony-rose thing, which weirdly smells nothing like an actual flower. This note, by the way, is pretty much the whole shebang when you get past the initial Yankee-Candle "timur pepper", which is really just a mildly spiced grapefruit/bergamot hybrid with a bit of supporting aspartame blackcurrant. What I find strange is the fruits smell deeply fake and sweet, just like the rose, and rather like—you guessed it—Yankee Candle. You can identify everything, and it smells bold enough to stick for a few hours. Not exactly cheap, per say. But Silver Mountain Water's blackcurrant is also sweet, and even a bit sour, and it doesn't smell remotely foody or aircare-like. Not so, Wild Vetiver. 

I hoped the base would bring in the grassy fields to justify the name. But the drydown is merely a watercolor sketch of Ambroxan and Habanolide, Ambrettolide, and maybe even some methyl laitone for more silky-smooth pseudo sweets. Ever since Carmina, Creed has been playing with this low-sugar rose-jam-meets-orange-marmalade thing that worked great in that fragrance, and somewhat well in Eladaria, but with Wild Vetiver it's a case of diminishing returns. Creed's new "Senior Business Development Manager" is happy to take a successful accord and milk it. Fine for some, perhaps, but for me? Cut the shit, Creed, and bring back Green Valley. You can do "green" better than this.

What note didn't I mention because I never once smelled it here? 

Crap, it'll come to me. 

Patchouli Cologne (Bourbon French Parfums)

When it comes to patchouli, people have experience-driven, subjective views. If you're older than 60, you picture headband-wearing, half-naked hippies who haven't bathed in months and use patchouli oil to cover the stench. If you're an old Millennial (X-ennial) like me, you tend to match it with balls-out masculine powerhouses of the '80s, stuff like Giorgio for Men and Lapidus pour Homme, which were still widely worn through at least the first half of the 1990s. If you're a young Millennial (born during or after 1986), you think of "dad" or "grandpa", and if you're a Gen Zombie with your characteristic lifeless stare, you recall Angel and A*Men, likely worn by an older brother or sister. In other words, somehow, someway, you know patchouli. 

Or do you? How many people turn to patchouli in the 21st century as a single-note material for niche perfumery? I'd hazard to guess, not many. An essential oil derived from the leaves of the Pogostemon cablin, an herb in the mint family, patchouli has a rich, earthy, and slightly sweet scent profile, and has been the cornerstone of perfumery since the dawn of time. A base material, it deepens and enlivens a scent structure while also strengthening core accords and enhancing longevity. Want a vibrant woody masculine that leans heavily in the abandoned sawmill direction? Patch. A crisp oriental with many disparate notes in desperate need of enduring unification? Patchety-patch patch patch. A basic fougère that simply needs a touch of testosterone? Where my Hare Krishnas at? 

But patchouli has a very real problem nowadays: it gets lost in the mix. The days of appreciating it as a "soli-note" material seem to have slipped into the distant past, with most of the Free Love era having aged out, and the remaining generations having disturbingly little love leftover for the natural woody distinctiveness of high-grade patchouli oil. Patchouli still gets used in perfume, as often as it ever did, finding its way in some form or another in many mainstream designer blends seeking to recapture the magic of the next Thierry Mugler phenomenon, but the heaploads of diabetes-inducing sugar that gets crammed into every new thing tends to obscure its presence, at best. When was the last time Paco Rabanne released a chesty one-note patchouli cologne? When was the last time a drugstore brand offered a mainline of patchouli with everything but the tourniquet and syringe? I hear crickets. 

Like nearly anything that is good these days, the only places to turn to for this sort of thing are ultra-expensive luxury brands or affordable but esoteric indie brands that require more than a modicum of interest to suss out of hiding. I've been on the market for a solid one-note patchouli fragrance for years now, but my hangup has been price; with so many economical classics on the market, I don't want to splurge and dump $350 on a Chanel like Coromandel, $450 on Dior's Patchouli Élixir Précieux (or their technically more budget friendly Coromandel comparative, Patchouli Impérial). Ironically, these perfumes are great and feature prominent patchouli, but with the exception of perhaps Patchouli Élixir Précieux, are somewhat embellished multi-note compositions that merely allow patchouli to star in an otherwise ensemble cast. No, I'd rather just find that hidden gem and truly one-note patchouli that insiders covet and gatekeep. The problem, of course, is that such a fragrance will be kept behind that gate, and finding it will happen only by chance. 

Enter "Patchouli" by Bourbon French Parfums. I happened upon it by chance. I tend to search for fragrances that are "grassy" and "green" and "woody-floral," so I was in the right ballpark. In my travels, and after reading about a handful of Lush and retired Jōvan fragrances, suddenly Fragrantica's Bourbon French page appeared. I was reading Shamus's reviews (author of the retired Pour Monsieur blog), and he had one for this fragrance. He writes:

"Whoa, this is some rip-roaring patchouli. Dark, damp, and dirty are the only words that adequately describe it. This is raw, balls-out, uncompromising patchouli that takes no prisoners . . . It's far too potent and ballsy to wear at the office, unless you're the guy in charge." 

This, of course, piqued my interest. Now, full disclosure: my familiarity with patchouli is limited to the essential oils found in health-food grocery stores and Indian markets. There are several of the former and only a few of the latter here in Connecticut. Most of the oils found at them are mid to low-grade in quality, and speak to the true essence of patchouli without offering a hi-fidelity take that you can comfortably wear. In other words, pretty good, but too crude. Decent enough to understand the scent, but rough enough to dissuade you from splashing it on. 

But a patchouli cologne from a respectable indie brand in the South that has offered fine toiletries since 1843? A scent that gets thumbs up from nearly every reviewer? Common threads—"raw" and "dark" and "potent"— mean count me in. I ordered the 4 ounce cologne blind and hoped I wouldn't be disappointed. After all, if it's "rip-roaring patchouli" and if it gets praise from Shamus, who spent years endorsing the most high-testosterone brews deemed worthy of a wardrobe, it must be the stuff. 

So, is it the stuff?

Well . . . not exactly. No.

Here's the thing. What Mary Behlar, owner and perfumer of French Bourbon, has done is take an essential oil akin to what you find in a health-food store, dilute it to a safe cologne strength (gotta abide that IFRA), and bottle it. Then she sells it for not much more than what you'd pay for the raw version at the grocery store. I should mention that it's unclear what concentration Shamus and other reviewers are writing about when describing this fragrance, so it's possible he's actually referring to the EDT or perfume strength version. I imagine those versions would simply smell exactly like the grocery store oils, but then again, maybe the perfumes are where Behlar really showcases her artistry. 

Here in the cologne, however, I'm not exactly blown away. Bourbon French's Patchouli smells dark(ish), a little dirty, not at all damp, sawmill-floor dry, and mostly like a discreetly finessed and polished marble of a patchouli after the rough edges of the raw material have been tidily rebalanced and tamed via the aforementioned dilution process. I do sense a slight touch of real perfumery in the drydown, with what feels to me perhaps like a light brushing of watercolor cedar, a microdose of Iso E Super to enhance that crisp-woody finish that decent patchouli oil naturally possesses. And that's another point in its favor—quality patchouli oil. Say what you will about the complexity or artistry, but there's no denying that whatever grade of patchouli is used here is a cut above what you'd find at your local Whole Foods. 

It's possible that my post-Covid nose, which sometimes waffles in sensitivity, simply isn't picking up the richer and bolder nuances of this fragrance, and maybe with more time I'll come around. It's also true that I'm able to catch very vague whiffs of the stuff throughout the work day with pretty modest application, we're talking one spray to the shirt and a couple under it, and it comes and goes like a phantom, sometimes entirely invisible, and others tripping the olfactory center of my brain into action. I agree that it smells entirely natural, which is of course a good thing, and it also smells pretty exquisitely balanced, which is probably the greatest technical feat here. Taking something as saturnine and burly as natural patchouli from India and recalibrating it into an easily wearable yet appropriately raunchy cologne is no small feat. 

With that said, this isn't the balls-out monster I was led to believe it would be. It's easily wearable at work. I wear it to work, and I work with several people who have no idea what a landline is. It is commanding in profile, yes, but in performance it feels civilized to a fault. I think my Givenchy Gentleman, which isn't even vintage, swings its patchouli dick more than Bourbon French's does. I get unwashed hippie imagery with both fragrances, but that honeyed chocolate snarl in reformulated Gentleman (even sans the intense civet of its 1970s formula) just feels more aggressive to me. It's an EDT concentration with very artfully blended supporting notes, while Behlar's blend has the disadvantage of being a lighter concentration with patchouli and not much else, so perhaps this isn't a good comparison. I will say again that it is uncontroversially better than the raw oils you get at your corner granola dive, so if you want something at least better (and allergenically safer) than that, this fragrance is a good place to look. 

I should also sincerely acknowledge that I do like this fragrance quite a lot, and I wear it, and I'm glad to own it. As a patchouli fragrance, it is undeniably good. And also, I want to age it a bit in the bottle, especially with air in there, and see how it matures. Perhaps in a few years it will darken and take on a more throaty timbre. Perhaps I should drop the extra $40 and look to the perfume?

In the meantime, the search for the truly intense and complex patchouli, which might only exist in my mind, continues . . . 

The Summer of '78: Ralph Lauren's Polo

When even cologne was too cool for school.

In my 2009 Fragrantica review for Polo, I wrote: 

"Polo is Yatagan without the bite. The smell of damp, freshly-cut grass in late September, complete with the earthy tinge of wood and soil. There's some old pine needles resting in there, too. I like Polo, but I'm not sure I would wear it. Other similar fragrances like Quorum and Yatagan can be had for less, and offer just as much, if not more." 

I read that today and think, is this still true?

It used to be true, particularly with late vintage Cosmair bottles from my high school days, which were blessedly overdosed with oakmoss and could clear a room with one spray. Polo belonged to the Grey Flannel school of "mean green" masculines, harkening from an era when manliness meant smelling like you'd just finished a long hot day of doing yard work. But times change (as I spent ample time complaining about in my prior post), and so does fragrance; Polo has been reformulated into the current "stubby sprayer" Luxury Products version in square green glass. How does it measure up in 2026?

I refer to the 2006 thread on Basenotes titled, "Polo Crest vs. Polo (Green)" and scroll down to "ChuckW's" 2017 comment: 

"I got my new bottle of Crest today. Not having owned this in almost 20 years, I had forgotten how much it's like the original. It's almost like 'Polo Lite.' This is a very nice scent. I'm glad I bought it." 

This was my experience with Crest, which I consider "Polo in miniature," with a pinch of sweet herbs and a simpler base of cedar and musk. If Polo Green smells like Connecticut woodland after a rainy night in the dead heat of July, Crest is those same woods after they've thinned and dried out in early October. But I recently added the original Polo to my collection, curious to know what time and possibly neglect has done to this landmark 1978 masculine. I myself have neglected Polo, only acquiring a bottle now, after nearly 20 years of connoisseurship and having already owned and enjoyed other Carlos Benaïm creations like Eternity for Men (1989) and Polo Ultra Blue (2018), after suddenly realizing that despite my love for all things green and rugged, I've never owned it. 

The current Luxury Products version of Polo is, in essence, Polo Crest with tobacco instead of sweet herbs. Lighter, fresher, airier than the hoary Warner iteration and even more rugged Cosmair formula, with that same bright piney opening accord, attenuated to ten minutes instead of an hour, followed by the rich, earthy, woody, slightly balsamic smell of, well, Polo. Not as much flab in the midsection, which was once a dark foray into the shadowy netherworld of 1970s oakmoss mysticism; the current Polo favors Crest's open-collared late summer breeze of humid grass, woods, and tobacco leaves. If there's a summer fragrance, it's Polo, just as it's always been. 

I think the current formula (mine is a 2023 batch) is perfectly fine, quite good actually, and with the exception of the missing oakmoss, I see no call for complaints. Unfortunately with fragrances as famous as Polo, there's also a lot of crappy takes out there. People speak of it as being a "fall/winter frag" despite Polo being a summer sport, the green bottle with gold polo player alluding directly to the verdant exhilaration of summer sport, and the fragrance itself piled high with accords that directly convey the aromatic experience of galloping after a polo ball through grass and pine scrub. So . . . . winter? Really? 

Even in its current formula, Polo smells quite literally like the woods here in central Connecticut on a humid 90 degree afternoon in early July. It's as if the fragrance were conceived of after Benaïm spent a week here traipsing through the wilderness, as I used to do as a child. The smells are all there, and Polo captures them as a thunderstorm is rolling in to break the sweltering heat, with the first heavy drops smacking down through the leaves. A winter fragrance this is not, for not all summer fragrances are about "light" and "fresh" and "blue." Summer is regional, and Polo is how it smells where I live. 

But Polo is also something more. Released the year Woody Allen filmed "Manhattan" (in which the feminine fragrance, Lauren, features prominently in one scene), the legendary '78 Buick Regal rolled into showrooms, and Abercrombie & Kent defeated Tulsa in the U.S. Open Polo Championship, Ralph Lauren's Polo has adopted a reputation for being the quintessential wealthy, middle-aged man's cologne. It is associated with East Coast wealth, success, and erudition, much more so than anything by Chanel, or Dior, or even Creed. Something about the branding—polo player on horse, polo as a wealthy person's sport, and the scent as something truly rarefied in its uncompromising adherence to masculine archetypes—puts Polo in its own special league as a fragrance for those who understand how personal scent conveys personality. 

I smell some Aramis Devin in it, even today. A sneaky dusting of cinnamon in both fragrances was an ingenious way of lending them some woody skank without needing any complex musk molecules, and both Devin and Polo utilize that judicious cinnamon in their heart and base accords. But where Devin leans on floral jasmine to give space to its trees, Polo takes a deeper, woodier tobacco direction. Its jasmine and rose petals offer brief flashes of brightness, like pockets of oxygen that lift Benaïm’s forested olfactory chiaroscuro, without ever turning into a literal flower garden.

Polo also makes good use of basil, which is often employed by perfumers as both a supporting player and even a full-on stand-in for pine. Here it adds to and extends the brief pine needle top note, giving that semisweet green snap a presence as the deeper brown tones take over. Chamomile was once a star note in the Warner and Cosmair versions, and while it flits briefly through the opening moments of the Luxury Products formula, it's too fleeting to consider it a serious part of the fragrance. I experience it as a nuance now, and am glad that it's at least allowed to be that. 

In recent years, I've written about how the woody, earthy, musky masculines of bygone eras are no longer practical for use in today's postmodern Millennial/Gen-Z culture. Young women have been conditioned into considering sugary body mists and barely-there cucumber waters desirable on both themselves and their men, thus rendering these virile classics as little more than stodgy dinosaurs and "dad scents." Polo is no exception. However, I would caution today's youngsters by pointing out that although it is the scent of 1978, which is nearly half a century ago now, 1978 was a pretty cool year, with some pretty amazing movie culture, some groundbreaking fine art, and some brand new (at the time) hit singles like "Just What I Needed" blaring from radios everywhere. 

Think stuff from 1978 is old-fogey "dad" juice? Listen honey, every girl could use a daddy. Polo was the scent of underdog cool guys on the prowl, and a lot of babies were made in its sillage. Just sayin'. 

Revisiting the 1980s Fragrance Not for the Kids: One Man Show (Jacques Bogart)

Keep out of Reach of Children

There's something militant about One Man Show, Roger Pellégrino's 1980 creation for the middle-shelf brand of Jacques Bogart. The battleship grey box. The olive green glass bottle, with even greener fluid inside. The way the brand's signature "b" glistens in brass like the cockade on a Russian soldier's cap. It all spells "Not for Children," as if Bogart execs wanted to convey a sense of inherent danger to anyone unprepared for what happens if you carelessly depress the atomizer. 

I used to dislike this fragrance, but time has a way of wrestling men into submission, and after many recent developments in the fragrance world, I find myself face-down on the mat. Back when I had things like Kouros and Krizia Uomo to turn to, One Man Show was a pointless exercise in olfactory crass that lacked the compositional genius of the former or the material focus of the latter. If I wanted an animalic fougére fix, the animalis (civet, tonkin musk) of vintage Kouros was impossible to beat. For rich woods, look no further than the photorealistic cedar base of Krizia Uomo. Back in 2012, I wrote: "The calibration was inspired but simple, of equal parts pine and oakmoss, styrax and castoreum, incense and geranium, all tuned to a high-pitched shrill. It smells weirdly majestic . . . " And I agree with me—it certainly did smell weirdly majestic, but also intense, raw, rugged, and a bit scary, like the problem-drinking teacher who grips your arm a little too tightly after breaking up a schoolyard disturbance. One Man Show wasn't for the young'uns. 

Today, Kouros is neutered and all but discontinued, Krizia Uomo is a dinosaur, and where can a guy go for a classic, early 1980s animalic punch in the nose? Come back, One Man Show, all is forgiven. I purchased a 100 milliliter bottle on eBay last month for $14.88, and I received it in a box stamped with an October, 2016 batch code—or maybe a 2006 batch code, since these codes tend to repeat every ten years. It came with a little dried-out and empty tube of aftershave balm, and from what I've heard they're always dried out, so naturally one must figure there's an obsessive-compulsive thief out there sitting on a vat of stolen One Man Show aftershave balm. The box warns: HIGHLY CONCENTRATED, and the bottle's black plastic atomizer sticks out from its cowl like the barrel of a gun. The text, "Jacques Bogart Paris" is printed in black, as if stamped, "Fit to Serve." 

With some trepidation, I sprayed One Man Show for the first time in 14 years. I was hit with a bright burst of aldehydic greens, followed by a grassy accord of what mainly smells like basil, artemisia, galbanum, and a particularly harsh bergamot note that recalls the skanky citruses of past classics like Moustache and Aramis, except here it competes with all those grassier tones. There's also a hint of civetone, but there's an even stronger hint of castoreum, which foretells what is to come. The first ten minutes smells the most like Krizia Uomo, minus the obvious lavender and fougére elements, but as the castoreum note steps forward, this changes. The focus here isn't on cedar, although there is some cedar tucked away somewhere. No, this fragrance is about the musks. Animalis, castoreum, a surprisingly restrained wink of textural civetone, all blaring together in that familiar New Wave masculine "powerhouse" way that only something from 1980 can manage. 

It's impossible to spray this stuff on and not immediately think of Phoebe Cates in a leotard. Fragrances like this were designed to bring out the inner animal in a man. It makes sense that the person who brought us Macassar and Gem would channel all the lusty stink of post-disco machismo into something as brutish and raw as Bogart's second masculine release. I've read from cognoscenti that current iterations of this formula neglect the animalics and naturals, but if so, my nose must be unaware of it, because this 9 (or 19) year-old bottle smells plenty old-school, natural, animalic, and mossy to me. There's no moss listed on the box, but if you know what it smells like, you know it's in there. Maybe they just, eh, forgot to alert the IFRA of its presence. 

Does this stuff scratch the itch left behind by those other lost masterpieces? Kind of. Look, the further out we get from the 1980s, the more this sort of thing dazzles, even when it's as crudely done as it is here. Pellégrino perfected the animalic citrus accord in his later and much more refined Versace L'Homme (984), and if you squint with that one, you can sort of see the resemblance to One Man Show. I can settle for this fragrance when I want the animalic snarl that I used to get from Kouros, and it'll work in a pinch when I wish I had the piney-green ambiance of Krizia Uomo. But the rough edges of this monstrosity are such that wearing it will be an exercise in cringe-inducing caution. Don't want to get hurt, and certainly don't want to hurt others. 

I work with a few people born in the 2000s, and spending more than 30 seconds around something this virile and overtly sexual might traumatize them. Lock the bottle in a safe, and memorize the combination. Little Johnny's not old enough to shoot yet. 

Shuhrah pour Homme (Rasasi)

While Rasasi and many of its UAE contemporaries are often known in Western fragrance circles for inspired-by takes on popular designer and niche scents, they occasionally put out something that feels more original (even when it really isn't, as rose/oud combos are anything but). In 2015, Rasasi did exactly that with Shuhrah pour Homme. The name “Shuhrah” refers to fame or renown in Islamic culture and is also used as a feminine name, which already gives the concept a slightly playful angle. The idea seems to be about status and attention, a scent for being noticed, whether you want to be or not. I happen to think that YouTube frag-bros and Reddit dipshits fuel most of the Arabian perfume craze here in the USA, so naming a perfume "Woman for Man" is culture-coded for us more than anyone in the Middle East. See my review of Tom Ford's Oud Wood for how I really feel. 

Shuhrah opens with a sharp, stemmy-green blast paired with a watery, soapy floral effect. Fragrantica, Parfumo, and Basenotes call this “tomato leaf” and “freesia,” but that framing doesn’t really hold up. Tomato leaf is unmistakable, but there is no literal tomato leaf note here, just a green, crushed-stem impression likely built from materials like cis-2-hexenol, Stemone, and other related aroma chemicals that mimic that bitter vegetal snap. The floral side reads more like a clean white floral accord than any specific flower, lifted by airy materials such as helional and Florol that give it a slightly aquatic, soapy brightness. It’s brisk, a little sharp, and honestly a bit divisive in those opening minutes.

Then it settles into what the fragrance is really about: rose. A big, dense, slightly honeyed Taif-style rose takes over and becomes the backbone of the entire composition. It’s rich, full-bodied, and carries a faint soapiness that feels more like budget construction than intent, which makes sense given the price point. Around the 90-minute mark, a smoky, ashy nuance starts creeping in, likely from something like cypriol (nagarmotha), which dries out the florals and adds a burnt, slightly tobacco-like edge. From there on, it’s a steady rose-and-smoke pairing, with the rose clearly in control while the smoke just adds atmosphere. It performs well and projects strongly, easily lasting most of the day. Whether that works for you depends on your taste for loud rose fragrances: if you like them, it’s an easy win at the price; if you don’t, it won’t change your mind, and more polished rose options exist from houses like Mancera and Montale.