Andy Warhol Lexington Avenue
Bond No. 9 × Andy Warhol (2008)

This is clearly Bond's take on Feminite du Bois, cleverly crossed with a traditional Cuir de Russie. It kicks off with a butterscotchy amber, made bright and sparkly with high-pitched violets and pepper. The leather comes in underneath fairly quickly. Meanwhile, buttery sandalwood fuses the leather with the pepper and buttescotch.

This makes for a stunning combination - leathery, buttery, sawdusty sandalwood with bright peppery violet on top and amber sneaking in around the edges. As the pepper fades, a fruitchouli plum/rose jam note reveals itself on top of the buttery, leathery wood. Late in the day, everything boils down to buttery leather.

This is desert all the way. Sweet, creamy, eatable and smells like a pudding with fruits and spices. But after the first hour mark, a nice peony note makes its appearance together with creamy sandalwood. It ends on the opposite side as it begun, because it doesn't smell like a desert anymore; it's floral, spicy (anise), woody.

this is a floral and fruity leather..shiny, shiny leather....wonderful!

The opening is unusual, mixing cardamom, anise and fennel, with a dark lemon accord transiently appearing. Overall a very nice start. In the drydown it declares its gourmand heart, with creme brûlée and sweet almond notes blending well with floral impressions. This is lovely, mild-to-moderately sweet but never too sweet. The is a hint of sandal added in the base, but the latter is the least convincing ingredient of this otherwise well composed scent. It is difficult to give one simple label to this fragrance, it is a bit outside the square in its overall approach. A restrained scent with poor silage and just decent projection, but a decent longevity of five hours on my skin. 3/5. Good for work in autumn.

Genre: Woods

Ew! The top notes on Lexington Avenue are downright disgusting. Jolly Ranchers, floral bathroom air freshener, and vinegar are the best I can do to describe them. It can only get better from there, right? Well, I can't quite say the rest of it is putrid. Not quite. But Lexington Avenue does vie with Carolina Herrera's horrific Chic for the title “Worst Feminine I Can Remember.”

There's probably a spot somewhere along Lexington, where bums have puked on a discarded bouquet and a spilled strawberry ice cream cone from Serendipity, that smells exactly like this. I hope I never find it. Lexington Avenue may, as ubuandibeme claims, be trying to channel Dolce Vita's dried fruit and cedar oriental structure, but it gets everything wrong: the fruit is acidic, the floral notes are harsh and chemical, and the woods are at once loud and blatantly artificial. It takes work to make something that smells this bad. It takes nerve to sell it for hundreds of dollars per bottle.

Run away!

It fascinates me to see that people dislike this scent for all the reasons that I fell in love with it. It *is* truly a mixed up scent... and that's what I love about it! There are opposing currents running up against themselves to create something new and fresh and delicious. I only had the chance to smell this once and I was hooked. I have a bottle on order and I can't wait for it to arrive. This may just be my new signature scent.

That said, I don't love the dry down nearly as much as the first few hours of the scent. It loses it's sweetness and only the musky undertones remain. It starts to feel a little bit more musky and masculine in the later hours. But still, I do love it.