African Night
AbdesSalaam Attar Profumo

Funny story, years ago when I had first started on exploring smells I had once purchased something that purported to be the essential oil of ylang-ylang and it was a horrible rubbery sickening sweet overripe banana scent. For awhile after that I had been apprehensive every time I saw "ylang ylang" listed in any description... Examples like this African Night showed me how wrong I was to be misled! As well as offering a good reminder of how truly important ingredient quality is to a fragrance.

The ylang-ylang here is beautiful, transparently diffusive and accompanied by a cooling sensation, perhaps like a night breeze. While I had learned since that not all ylang-ylang smells what I had first encountered, African Night may be the first fragrance to truly win me over to how lovely the flower smells in center stage.

For a floral, this is an introverted floral; not loud or assertive, but with a simple sophistication, calming and subtly grounding. The rosewood and rose provide a wonderful tender and subtle center to the ylang-ylang. To me this is a great scent for reading, and settling into work that requires focus and deliberation---with enough breathing room for a deep inhale and sniff every so often, of course.

Some comparisons come to mind with Lake Flower, which I also enjoyed and thought was lovely, but African Night speaks more to my personal preferences. This is one I am considering a bottle of on my next order.

African Night (Notte Africana) has a light and very soft relaxing scent of cool night breezes and exhalaing floral woods. This fragrances is YlangYlag tinted with grapefruit in the opening and rosewood at the base. The primary scent is Ylang-Ylang and at first this smells like a high quality soliflore Ylang essential oil used in relaxation response for aromatherapy. It is a very relaxing and calming fragrance. There is a cool tropical night air scent that comes from the mix of grapefruit with ylang, layered over rosewood. The rosewood adds an exotic ethnic dry incense wood base that invites comparison to the incense floral, Timbuktu from L' Artisan. I give this a thumbs up, but its simplicity, although pleasant to smell is not much more than a simple but pure high quality Ylang essential oil. Simple this might be, but it does smell good!

On paper, I smelled Star Jasmine, the kind I used to have growing outside my house in northern California. When baking in the sun, Star Jasmine has a different quality than at night. African Night's jasmine smells more of the cool scent I smell from Star Jasmine in the evening--sweet and cool, a bit less indolic than during daytime. The jasmine fades to reveal ylang ylang, and it has the typical lemon-woody on the verge of furniture polish smell that I associate with this essence. The floral combination is rather intoxicating and also gives a sense of calm. I am not sure if there is actually spice in this fragrance, but I do smell a little bit of clove. Some flower essences such as carnation give this effect. It is very pretty, and the floral accord seems to last a long time. I really love the softly spicy drydown. Overall, it smells mostly floral and is a rather soothing scent. On my skin, I can detect the jasmine and ylang ylang quite strongly. However, unlike smelling AN on paper, I smell a gasoline note. The gasoline note is somewhat like what I found in Profumo's two African Queen fragrances (on paper), but not quite as overpowering. There is definitely an animalic tone which I didn't find to be as forward on paper. I do not feel nearly as calmed with this fragrance on my skin, probably because the gasoline note, while greatly subdued compared to African Queen, is a bit offputting. As the fragrance starts to dry, I smell the hint of spice I noticed before.African night really comes on strong in the top notes, but settles quickly. Unfortunately, I feel like I can't even get in the door with it. For me, it is obviously better if it is not used as a personal fragrance, but rather on paper or other evaporation method in a similar application to aromatherapy. I recommend testing this, especially for jasmine lovers. It is really quite lovely!