Beloved Woman
Amouage (2012)

You're at a tea party in the early afternoon. It's the spring of 1871, and your servants are pouring fresh chamomile tea for you and your girlfriends. You breathe deeply and absorb the blooming rose garden around you, picking out the speckled lavender flowers and ferns in your mind. As you all chat and laugh together, dusty incense dances off of your Victorian dresses, reminding you of the Catholic mass you had all just attended that morning. Beloved Woman by Amouage.

During the opening moments of this scent, I fall swooningly in love with the herbal and almost-harsh rose and grassy notes that rise up to meet me in a whoosh-y aromatic cloud. I am a sap for just this kind of beginning: a bittersweet greenness that is both creamy and tart and undergirded with resins and something approximating patchouli. I'm assuming that the chamomile and clary sage are primarily responsible for my infatuation with Beloved's top notes, but the rest of the scent is gorgeous, too. Initially, I am reminded of Aromatics Elixir, but here, that beautiful old beast is softened and rounded into something a bit less bombastic and sharp. This is just my kind of thing, a green and chypre-ish scent that is also musky and just slightly animalic. A stunner at any price.

Beloved is beautifully done. But what strikes me most about Beloved is that it is Amouage's homage to that great classic, Clinique's Aromatics Elixir, just as surely as Jubilation 25 is a homage to classic French fruity chypres such as Rochas Femme or Diorella.

Beloved opens up with a bitter, powdered clove, lavender, and sage combination that smells as aromatic and as talc-like as one of those quaint gentlemen's colognes you might find at Penhaglion's, or indeed a modern interpretation of a Dandy perfume, such as Histoires de Parfums' 1876. There is a certain spicy, resinous, talc-like feel that links all these fragrances in my mind.

But more than anything, the rose, the hay-like chamomile, the sage all sing a tune that is familiar to me from my lovely, pagan, mother earth Aromatics Elixir. AE is earthier, dirty with patchouli, and far more ‘deep down in the forest' than Beloved. Beloved is a fine lady, and AE is a hippy mom. But the essential bone structure is there. One was like the other in a different life, and all that.

The rose note in Beloved is pretty remarkable. Hidden behind the aromatic powder of the opening, you might miss it at first, but then it swells in intensity, rising up from a crumble of dusty potpourri rose petals to become a big, juicy rose fluffed out by moisture. The rose lingers for a while in a pool of boozy, hay-like immortelle, for a combination that is simultaneously syrupy and dry, sweet and savory. The immortelle adds a lovely ‘baked grass' note to the florals and makes it feel less rarified than the start.

The dry down of Beloved is more pedestrian and standard-Amouage-oriental fare than its ‘Classic French' opening and heart. After the herbal chypre dressing gown is dropped to her ankles, Beloved lurches off into a dry, resinous base made up of cedar, a heavily spiced musk, and a fairly bitter olibanum (Frankincense). This part's a bit of a snooze after the impressive first half, but it's still an Amouage base, so you know things weren't done on the cheap or stuffed full of nasty, cheap woody ambers.

Beloved is unquestionably a beautiful, almost intoxicating perfume, but I won't be spending any money on it. For one, it is over-priced, even within the usual standards for an Amouage fragrance, and for my money, Aromatics Elixir performs a similar trick of making the wearer feel womanly, powerful, and in control of her own fate, but at almost ten times less the cost of one bottle of Beloved. That said, there is an uneasy beauty about it that moves me, and I put it down to the bitter-liquorish, golden afternoon note of immortelle, casting its warmth over the cool, forest-like tones of the rest of the fragrance.

Armouage restrainedThe opening with it's floral- clove character develops quickly to display a delightful rose-jasmine note, which later is combined with some lavender to a beautiful trio. Later violet and ylang-ylang lead to a base of cedar, vanilla, and a gently spicy musk. All this is always smooth and exceptionally well blended, and the constituents are of the highest quality, but the development and the overall impression are not exceptional. Atypical for many other Amouage fragrances, this one is never loud, and always exudes elegant restraint. Silage and projection are good. Total longevity is very good at about seven hours, with the last hour seeing it reduced to a rose-tinted powdery shadow of its initial self.

Beloved money-spinner Have you listened to a pristine record being played on quality hi-fi equipment lately? Even at low volumes you could still hear the music come alive. To my mind Amouage BELOVED may be described thus, in similar terms. This tastefully rendered floral is anything but loud, projecting modestly with an undeniable crystalline quality to it that twinkles like a star-dusted evening sky. The rose is deliciously tart, the jasmine sublime and the resinous base invitingly warm. Yet they are all seamlessly and harmoniously blended. I am smitten. But the price tag left me cold. *sigh* If only more women invest in such beautiful fragrances instead of over-priced luxury handbags... Pros: Out-of-this-world blendCons: Out-of-this-world price tag"

Amouage is a house that tends to think more is more. Some of their more recent scents (Memoir, Interlude) have devolved into boozy, smoky (albeit rich) nightclub scents that turn into a bad hangover on me. Beloved is a blessed relief from that overwrought trend. A softer Amouage is still huge, and Beloved would not enter the realm of daywear scents for me. Despite its pretty florals, it doesn't send me in to swoons of love, and Amouage's heavy woodsy/patchouli/musky drydown turns a hair too sweet on my skin. My pocketbook is eminently happy to take a pass on Beloved.