Pineward's Velvetine is one such amber, of the trashiest variety. It presents as the brand's real "core expression" to me, more so than Fanghorn II, in that it embodies the pedestrian "candle amber" that imbues more than half of the range's offerings with its pervasive and amorphous sweetness. It's as if Nicholas Nilsson took a pair of tweezers to the line, extracted that essence, and called it a perfume. If you're into that sort of thing, Velvetine is for you. I'm aware of two elements when smelling it: a beautiful ambergris accord in the top that lasts about ten minutes, reminiscent of a similar handling of ambergris in YSL's original Kouros, followed by a perpetually incipient amber of vanilla, clove, cinnamon, incense, and labdanum, with a hint of the ambergris sweetness adding some dimension to the vanilla. Compact, dusky, semisweet, rather warm and fuzzy. Not bad, except it doesn't develop much, and you can get this kind of thing from classics like vintage Cinnabar, and the aforementioned Tabu. (These vintages are available in abundance on eBay.)
Perfumers usually fail not from a lack of talent, but from a lack of vision. Velvetine is a work of great talent, but a failure because it courses haplessly after an ideal fragrance "type," the classical oriental, without ever gaining purchase. Wearing it feels like an exercise in nostalgia that doesn't build on itself, but instead collapses under its own weight. It is as if Nilsson saw vintage Cinnabar and Tabu, but not his own versions of them. He used no brighter notes of citrus or white florals to balance the resins. There are no aldehydes, which keeps everything earthbound. And the dry-down remains linear for hours, reminding the wearer of what could have been.