Perfume Reviews by ClaireV

L'Eau de Tarocco by Diptyque

The epitome of a dumb reach, L'Eau de Tarocco does a simple thing very well - a zesty, just-peeled orange, sustained by a barely there saffron leather accord and a softly spiced rose - but it's taken me years and exposure to other, clumsier citrus perfumes to understand just what a feat it pulled off. Everything here smells natural, bright, and 'clear' in the traditional Diptyque style, which I'd define as fruits, flowers, and resins pulled straight from nature and pinned to a wooden board like butterflies in a clear museum case. But the saffron, with its slight iodine-y, rubbery aroma, and that clove-ish cinnamon, breathes something alive and exotic into its corners, fleshing it out and extending it without taking the focus off that bright, juicy orange.

It's not enormously robust or complex, and nobody would ever call its performance 'beast mode', but that it smells like a slightly exotic, freshly-peeled blood orange for an hour or two without poisoning the well with Agikalawood, Amberwood, Iso E Super, etc. is one of those tiny marvels (or small mercies) of modern perfumery that I'll never not be grateful for.

Avicenna White Rose & Oud by Annette Neuffer

Avicenna White Rose & Oud is my personal favorite of Annette Neuffer’s takes on rose, perhaps because it turns such a (by now) familiar paradigm on its head. The marriage of rose and oud is a natural one, the gentle, bright sweetness of rose tempering the sour, moody darkness of oud, and as such is a popular trope in perfumery. But even a template this good gets old after a while.

What I love about White Rose & Oud is that it reimagines the rose-oud pairing in the context of a witch’s apothecary in the Middle Ages, giving it new angles I hadn’t considered before. The opening is a pungent herbal lemonade that has dried to crystals on a mantelpiece somewhere, before being swept into a pestle and mortar with a bunch of dusty culinary herbs and ground to a fine powder. But before you think, wow, this is super sour and harsh and I don’t like it, in rolls an intoxicating lush, Turkish delight rose that softens all the sharp edges. The interplay of that rosy loukhoum against the tart, almost brackish oud – which you realize is what the deeply sour herbaciousness in the topnotes was camouflaging – is brilliant.

The umami, wheaten sandalwood in the basenotes interacts with the oud and other woody notes to create an accord so dry and 3D and aromatic that it feels like watching plumes of barkhoor smoke hanging heavy in the air or hot benzine shimmering in the thick air at the fuel court. But while recognizably (finally) a rose-oud scent, White Rose & Oud never feels exotic in a tokenistic manner, perhaps due to its persistent streak of antiseptic sourness – that medieval apothecary vibe – that runs through it from top to bottom. I like to think that Bernard Chant would have liked the witchy 1970s feel of this, even if he didn’t quite get the whole rose-oud reference the way modern perfume wearers do.

Rosa Alba by Annette Neuffer

Rosa Alba is based around a rare, white Bulgarian rose varietal named, well, Rosa Alba (rose of the dawn). It has simple but powerful beauty of a freshly picked rose from a wet garden, with its alluring mixture of lemon zest, geranium leaf, and finally, a trembling, jellied, pink rosewater loukhoum nuance tucked deep into the tightest folds near the heart. A resinous, powdery (slightly sour) sandalwood is the only other element here, lending the fragrance the feel of a traditional Indian attar. This is the immense, timeless beauty of a flower stuffed inside the flimsiest of shells. And though arguably a direct copy of nature, you’d have to be a marble statue not to be moved by a smell like this.

Honeysuckle Rose by Annette Neuffer

Honeysuckle Rose is a fat but wilting white flower, a vine of jasmine or tuberose curling in on itself, buried in swathes of beeswax and furniture polish. It smells like sweet tea and nectar and female skin putrefying in a Southern heat so intense that you can almost see the beads of moisture popping up. I smelled a honeysuckle bush once in the South of France and was shocked by how fleshy and sultry it actually is, in contrast to its rather innocent reputation.

This perfume smells like honeysuckle in the air – heady, rudely floral, honeyed – but powdery and slightly dank on the skin, like a cup of over-stewed tea. The oily cedar-like notes of a dank rosewood add to the impression of a flower floating in a gong bath, a flash of something white and delicate in the Vantablack gloom. It is only later, once the bitterness of the tea and woods has subsided, that Honeysuckle Rose reveals its final, true form – a sunny orange blossom busily licking the sticky grunge of beeswax and rosewood off its fur. The contrast between light and dark is startling, like a bar of the whitest goat’s milk soap carved from a block of resin. A trace of warm, dark honey lingers underneath this, like licked skin, recalling some of Vero Kern’s perfumes (Rozy in particular, with its attractively stale, louche rose breath).

Oud Mood Eau de Parfum by Lattafa

Despite the name, this is not similar to Oud Satin Mood, nor is it supposed to be. Rather, it is a jammy, synthy rose-oud that would be unbearable to me were it not for the odd little shifts in its trajectory that keep me entertained. It starts out as a jammy rose with the regular Lattafa oud – a vile, rubbery synth that smells like tries covered in caramel and signed with a blowtorch – before suddenly shifting into a wet, sheepy labdanum that feels shockingly moldy. But before I can begin to pigeonhole this, it morphs again, this time into what I can only describe as a dollop of strawberry-flavored marshmallow fluff. This odd accent, making its oddly late entry, develops into the most delicious scent of doll head I have ever smelled. It is the kind of scent I follow strange women into crowds for, trying to find out what it is. I don’t know why I love this incredibly sweet, dopey smell so much, the only explanation that makes sense to this Mitsouko-wearing, middle-aged woman being that it triggers a Proustian flashback to me playing with My Little Pony when I was a kid. This accord acts like a sugar high, complete with post-ingestion self-loathing and shame.

The last twist is that somewhere in the drydown it flips 180 degrees from a syrupy, dollhead-esque rose-oud into a gritty, benzoin-based amber that smells like speckles of brown sugar on a pie crust. It takes me a few wears until I realize that they have shoehorned the dregs of Raghba into the bones of this scent, making everything else stand atop its sturdy legs. Listen, I don’t think Oud Mood is a particularly well-designed perfume. Neither is it objectively ‘good’ under any lens you might examine it under. It is loud and scratchy and obnoxious as heck for a solid 70% of its development trajectory. But I’m keeping it around on the off chance that some day, I myself am feeling loud and scratchy and obnoxious and need a fragrance that can stand shoulder to shoulder with me.

Yara by Lattafa

This is THE mall scent in East Africa. Ladies of all ages from pre-teen to matron seem to be wearing it. Having tried it multiple times, I can only guess that the desire to smell clean, fluffy, and feminine is universal among women who view perfume as an extension of their grooming ritual and not as the wild, yearning carpet ride into the belly of my imagination as I do. Seen through this lens, one could do much worse than Yara. It is a warm fruity-floral suffused with a rosy, marshmallowy musk that has no sharp corners to it at all and no delineation between one note and the next. Some reviews say this smells like fluffy strawberry milk, the appeal of which I do understand, but this is very much a case of wishful thinking. I think the general idea here is good – pillowy, soft, clean – but either spring for something that goes full hog on it, like Teint de Neige, or spend the Yara money on the equally cheap but far more beautiful and fluffier Ana Abjedh Poudrée.

Khamrah by Lattafa

I bought this for my son as part of his Christmas presents last year because he is 13 and gets all his perfume recommendations from Tik Tok (oh, the indignity). Angel’s Share by Kilian is hugely hyped on that channel and people suggested this as a dupe. Now, Khamrah is not a dupe of Angel’s Share and we were both smart enough to know it was the near identical bottle that created this impression rather than the scent itself, but ‘similar vibes’ was all he wanted.

Still, expectations properly tempered and all, we were both a little disappointed in Khamrah. It is sweet to an unpleasant extreme, like dried fruit macerated in sugar syrup for three months and then poured over one of those potent, spiky ambers that have more to do with Amberwood or Iso E Super than actual resin. The combination of sweet and synthy comes off as slightly cheapened – a feature emphasized by an ghostly coconut Glade note that haunts the drydown – and based on how little my son wears or talks about it, I can tell he also doesn’t think it measures up to the hype.

Perhaps I poisoned the well a little by giving him a travel bottle of Ambre Narguilé by Hermes while we were waiting for the Khamrah to arrive, because what else is Angel’s Share but a poor copy of Ambre Narguilé? I knew when his pupils expanded as he took his first sniff that Khamrah never stood a chance.

Lattafa Pride : Art Of Arabia I by Lattafa

A very simple, fresh citrus scent with a touch of astringent black tea. The tannins and silvery, woody blast of bergamot lightly mark the scent out as masculine, though as there is nothing so particularly butch about it – no oakmoss, lavender, or coumarin – that a woman couldn’t pull it off. It doesn’t feel overly synthetic, even though it hovers close to the functional category. I just don’t find it very compelling. I bought a 20ml bottle of it for my son and though he likes it well enough, I think its main attraction to him is as a quick sprucer-upper in lieu of a shower.

Lattafa Pride Ansaam Gold by Lattafa

I have never smelled Oriana by Parfums de Marly, after which this is supposedly modelled, but I can confirm that Ansaam Gold is in the same wheelhouse as Love, Don’t be Shy by Kilian, the OG of this particular scent DNA (very little being genuinely original in perfumery). If you like that sweet, orange blossom-scented marshmallow fluff kind of scent, then Ansaam Gold is precisely that and there is no real need to buy a niche variant for $200-300 more. I was going to add ‘unless you’re actively trying to avoid the garish-looking bottle of the Lattafa’ when I remembered that the Parfums de Marly bottles are equal in the eyesore stakes.

I don’t personally aspire to smelling like a fluffy, orange-y marshmallow but Ansaam Gold is not bad either. It is just a little too cute and girlish for it to be something I reach for more than once a year. I will say, however, that there is a powdery, woody nag champa note in here that is missing in the By Kilian scent, and that this is a marked improvement, as it tamps down the syrupy sweetness of that childish orange blossom note to a bearable degree.

Nebras by Lattafa

The hint of red berry combining with the vanilla gives the topnotes a sweet, anisic character, but with a cheap edge, like those Licorice Allsorts sweets that are a clear anise gel inside and covered with tiny fruity pebbles on the outside. What strikes me about Nebras from that point onwards is how nice but unremarkable it is. A sugary vanilla with a faintly dusty edge that might be cocoa but might also be practically anything else, the fruit and anise accents leaving only a trace of a black licorice gumminess. I almost admire its roundness and lack of edge, but even I – having bought a whole bottle of it – cannot pretend it is anything but a banal little Vanilla Fields body spray type of thing.

And actually, this is how I’m using Nebras, as a gentle layer of something vanilla-ish, set at the indoor voice levels of a scented body lotion, under sharper, bustier perfumes that need their edges smoothing out a little. I realize, of course, that I could achieve the same objective with the Yves Rocher Bourbon Vanilla body lotion, but that is super expensive and hard to find in Africa, so Nebras it is.

Khaltaat al Arabia Royal Blends by Lattafa

This is another one of Lattafa’s super potent, Amberwood-powered spice bombs aimed squarely at being the loudest bish in the room. The tech bros will love this one, because like Bade’e Al Oud Honor and Glory, Soleil de Jeddah Mango Kiss, and Erba Pura, it is yet another attempt to make fruit butch. Now, I don’t know why fruit has to be turned inside out with woody ambers so strident they will strip sebum from your pores at a distance of five meters for them to be macho enough for the bros to wear, but pleasant they are not.

I feel the same way about Royal Blends as I do Erba Pura, which is to say, puzzled at what the pear or apple ever did to anyone to deserve being dipped into Windex and rolled around in cigarette ash until there’s enough grit on it to pass as manly. Men, why can’t your mangoes and apples just be soft, juicy, and sunny? Let fruit be fruit, not a cigar, or a glass of whiskey, or the whole darned library, or whatever other masculine trope they are throwing at the genre these days. I can smell Royal Blends on my clothes after two wash cycles, which is never a good sign, but God knows, maybe that’s what men want. I don’t know.

Bade'E Al Oud by Lattafa

My father wears this, which surprises me, because his favorite perfumes are fresh, woody-citrusy vetivers – think Timbuktu, Terre d’Hermès, Eau Sauvage, and Quercus. I asked him about it, and he said that he only wears it at night when watching TV, so that he is not disturbing anyone but himself. ‘It’s a bit loud, alright,’ he admitted sheepishly. A bit loud? The Krakatoa Eruption was probably quieter. It is one of those perfumes that I have difficulty perceiving individual notes, obscured as they are by a noxious cloud of greyish, fuzzy Cilit Bang-like chemicals that bloom suddenly and violently, like the blast wave of an atomic bomb. People say they can smell leather, oud, and patchouli in this – I cannot. All I smell is harsh.

A review for Bade'e Al Oud Honor and Glory, since it's not in the directory:

A garish, synthetic-smelling nightmare of a fragrance that pairs a strung-out pineapple note over a depressingly Ambroxinated amber for a result that would be obnoxious in an Axe spray, let alone a personal fragrance. It brays sporty blue masculine in big neon letters, even though the billing is all crème brulée and lush, tropical, juicy pineapple. And you know, I am not sure what it was about that description that made it sound so attractive to me in the first place. Possibly the worst thing you could find at the bottom of a bowl of crème brulée are chunks of pineapple. I mean, have you seen what too much pineapple does to your tongue? Just imagine what it will do to the soft, wobbly custard. Curdle city, baby,

Anyway, all I can smell is the dreadful screech of whatever woody amber they have stuffed into this thing, but I am sure that the people who hate this scent will blame it for being ‘too spicy’. Spicy, my ass. Spice is pleasantly nose-tickling, even at its most aromatic or fiery (chili, black pepper) and cannot be held responsible for the almost physically painful nostril sand-blasting effect of nasty, loud aromachemicals.

Someone, somewhere will bleat plaintively, but what about the turmeric? To which I say, what about the turmeric? Turmeric is the face flannel of Spices. Sure, it can boast of its brilliant ochre dyeing properties and its anti-inflammatory effects, but let’s get real, sensory-wise, it smells like licking the surface of your child’s first attempt at an un-Kilned bowl at a pottery class. It’s an off-brand saffron, or an even cheaper henna, with a dusty, astringent medicine feel. It is not going to set your tongue or nose on fire. No, that’ll be the Amberwood or whatever aromachemical accounts for Honor and Glory’s special flavor of screech. I see this scent clearly, and unfortunately, it is ug-leeee.

Qaaed by Lattafa

I bought Qaa’ed for my husband in 2021 and all four of us have rued the day I did ever since. Taken in (and not for the last time, I bet) by all the mentions on Fragrantica of warm gingerbread or cardamom cookies, and conveniently ignoring all the reviews that mentioned how it smelled like a loud men’s aftershave, I imported it at some expense from Indian eBay, from whence it was dispatched – it seemed to me, given the seven weeks it took to arrive – on the back of manatees and elephants.

Exotic back story and all, you might say my expectations were high. One spray was enough to reveal the gravity of my mistake. Give it some time to ‘macerate’ they said, and that synthetic-smelling roar will die down to reveal the glories of a highly spiced, leathery, caramelized woody scent. Reader, it’s been three full years since this thing got shoved to the back of the sock drawer, and having pulled it out again just now, it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that Qaa’ed needs a full 36 months of aging to smell a mere 10% better than it did when you first opened the bottle.

Rather than tell you what’s ok about this scent (a short list indeed, and includes the bottle), I am going to tell you about what’s wrong with it. First of all, the combination of treacly, syrupy sweet notes over those brash ‘burnt wood’ aromachemicals make it smell like any generic designer scent that markets itself as ‘smoky’ or ‘oriental’ these days – anything that comes in a black bottle, basically – and is unfortunately close to the chemical marshmallow BBQ stench of By the Fireplace. The cardamom and other spice notes barely register against the burnt but radiant woody amber, so the gingerbread cookies remain trapped in your hopes and dreams rather than making it out there on your arm. Lastly, its spicy masculine leather notes take it beyond the outer limits of my personal gender stretchiness – I would no more wear this than I would Brut or Old Spice (but obviously, I am not you, so you do you).

Lastly – and yes, I know I already promised that the last point was ‘lastly’ but since my hatred of this knows no bounds, I shall continue – it contains a sulfurous chemical that smells like boiled cabbage or broccoli farts, which means it’s giving a little Hard Leather, another monstrosity, this time of the Norlimbanol sort.

Lattafa Pride Ishq Al Shuyukh Gold by Lattafa

Ishq Al Shuyukh Gold is a thick welterweight of a perfume – a doorstopper actually – featuring a meaty, red, drippingly iodic saffron leather boot left to fester and ooze and impregnate a bowl of the heaviest vanilla cream imaginable. The pungency of the saffron is immense, with its burnt tire and bitter, metallic medicine aspects out on full display, all adding up to a rich, rubbery leather note that seems too raw and bloody to be put in the front window, but you feel the economic pressure to rush it out anyway.

The thick, custardy vanilla lapping at its raw, meaty edges is a dopamine rush that you can hear thundering at you a mile away, like the hot oatmeal pouring down the hill towards the villagers in The Girl and the Porridge Pot story. It is so dairy rich. Though a bit rough and scary at the start, the beauty of this scent is in the drydown, when everything smells like soft, buttery, but still a bit leathery, like a vanilla pod removed from its bath of cream and split open easily with the merest touch of pressure from your fingernail.

It is very similar to Vanagloria, without the fresh pineapple weirdness, which I guess makes it similar to YSL Babycat and Rosendo Mateu #5, but if I could get the 135 euros back that I spent on Vanagloria (Laboratorio Olfattivo), my favourite of this genre, and put 35 euros down on Ishq instead, then I would. Since they all traverse the same basic trajectory from a thick, tight knot of sticky resins, leather, and saffron to a smoother, more relaxed ‘black vanilla cream’ suede aroma, there is not much point in owning more than one of these exemplars. However, I am happy with keeping a bottle of Ishq in Africa and a bottle of Vanagloria in Europe. Separated by continents and whole economic markets, they each occupy a different plane of existence, like similarly sized planets in solar systems millions of light years away from one another.

Liam by Lattafa

Though famously a dupe of Gris Charnel, I love this as a perfume in its own right – it is a bright, citrusy green fig leaf brewed in rubbery black tea, with the masculine prickle of cardamom and a cooling veil of icy iris milk straight from the fridge. Both aromatic and creamy, I feel like a lighter version of myself when I wear it. Woodier than the original Gris Charnel and sweeter than Gris Charnel Extrait, it straddles a happy middle ground that is not so one or the other than you feel guilty for wearing a dupe.

Further, unlike Gris Charnel Extrait, which unspools into a messy, synthy woodsy affair upon reaching the four hour mark, Liam Grey holds on to its smooth quality until the bitter end. It smells like the milky masala chai I drink from a local coffee house. Perfumes like Liam Grey make me think someone at Lattafa has realized that not everything they turn out have to have that rubbery synth edge for a perfume to be beautiful and long-lasting. I would never spend BDK prices of a bottle of Gris Charnel, partially because I already own a scent in the same genre (Remember Me by Jovoy) and partially because I think only Caron has the right to charge over 300 euros for a genuine extrait (though I wouldn’t pay Caron prices for the state of Caron output these days). But I was and am happy to take a 25 euro gamble on a bottle of Liam. For me, it is a ridiculously high return on investment for a scent that gives me everything that the original does.

Ana Abiyedh by Lattafa

This is a review for Ana Abyedh Poudrée, which is not in the directory yet. This is a creamy, fluffy musk with enough rose and other florals to make it feel chewy, like a soft, white nougat wrapped in edible sugar paper. Loaded with what feels like cashmeran as well as several type of white musk molecules, it achieves a doughy cream-on-cream effect that I personally find irresistible. It is somewhat similar to Teint de Neige by Lorenzo Villoresi, but a little sharper and without the overwhelming density of powder that the Villoresi scent famously brings. The powder aspect of Ana Abyedh Poudrée is at first milky, like a doughnut soaked in tres leches, then super dry – almost tinder box dry – like the trail left by an incense stick or ash in the air after burning Palo Santo. It is this shifting contract between sharp and soft, doughy and dry, milky and powdery, that I find so appealing. It may not be everyone’s idea of an ideal white musk, but it comes close to mine.

Khamrah Qahwa by Lattafa

People say that if you have Khamrah then owning Khamrah Qahwah is redundant – I strongly disagree. Khamrah Qahwah is a substantially better perfume. The addition of the bitter coffee grounds and fresh, almost green-lemony cardamom notes turn a dull, date-heavy dessert into something far more aromatic and rich in contrast.

The synthetic sawcut drone of the Ambroxan and the cheap, greasy coconut hairspray nuance of the original is muffled under the thick layer of warm, messy ambers and spices, and only ever bothers me when I’ve been swimming and the pool chemicals have peeled all this back to reveal the ugly synthetic skeleton. In general, though, this is smooth, rich, and a warm, nutty ‘brown’ scent on me, a sort of Lutensian-lite, easy listening shortcut to orientalia. I like that it reminds me of living in Brcko, where older Bosnian Muslim ladies taught me how to suck down the thickly matted Turkish coffee through a single cardamom pod clasped between my upper and lower front teeth. Khamrah Qahwah is similar in that it’s gently, not rudely, exotic.

Raghba by Lattafa

Kalemat on steroids. It smells exactly like warm treacle tart, which is made with Lyle’s Golden Syrup and breadcrumbs pressed gently into an all-butter, short-crust pie shell, but over a rubbery, slightly sour oud wood note that, although more joss stick than actual oud, is surprisingly effective at balancing out that syrupy sweetness. At its heart, it’s an amber, but I always feel that it is much more than that, and that the best I can do is to say it is warm dry wood meets nag champa meets toasty resin and a syrup facet that might be fruit or grain derived, but it doesn’t matter because it is both homespun and slightly exotic in a generic manner. I love it.

Badee Al Oud Amethyst by Lattafa

The neighborhood where I live is roughly 50% Muslim, 50% Christian, so I see my fair share of ladies wearing everything from the hijab and a relaxed niqab to the full-on burqa. They all seem to be wearing either Yara or Amethyst, billowing regally from beneath their voluminous folds. I was at a drag race rally (not sure if this is the right name for it) around Eid-al-Fitr in April, which I enjoyed intensely not because of the car racing but more for the deeply exotic scents mingling in the warm air – the hot rubber and asphalt from the screeching tires, the spicy, cuminy sweat of unwashed men’s shirts, and the intensely jammy rose and jasmine loudness of the combined perfumes steaming in thick roils off my niqabi ladies.

Amethyst captures everything of this event – the smoky, rubbery petrol fumes, the rich roses, the Turkish delight rosewater flavour, the Arabian jasmine – and even if it does immediately smell a little synthetic, it smells so fabulously out there and regal that you can’t help you be wowed. The thing that makes me pause – and the reason I haven’t bought a bottle yet – is that the drydown is a little sour and ashy, like me after a night in the pub. Still thinking about it, though.

Musamam White Intense by Lattafa

Musamam White Intense is baffling. I bought it because all the descriptions I could fine online were for a creamy but fresh coconut-sandalwood scent. The only lactones I love are the ones that exist in nature, i.e., milky notes wrenched from peach skin, fig leaf sap, or sandalwood, rather than from an off-the-shelf aromachemical labelled ‘milk’ or ‘gelato’, so the naturally blond-on-blond idea of Musamam White Intense appealed greatly to me. But smelled blind, I would have pegged this more as the lime peel and rubbery, peachy undertones common to some frangipani materials, over a tart, pale lumberyard-ish wood that might be sandalwood but that could also be hinoki or oak, given its vague, slightly featureless woodiness (I guess I was right about the blond). While it’s true, technically, that there is a tiny bit of milkiness and a nuance one might conceivably define as coconutty if you squint hard enough, the character of this scent is mostly sour, silvery woods washed in a mineral stream with citrus rind. There is a tart pineapple not in there somewhere, too.

Despite the gap between expectation and reality, I quite like Musamam White Intense and wear it the most out of all my recent acquisitions. Or, maybe it’s not so much that I like it but that I have yet to figure out what it smells like to me. It continuously evades my grasp, which frustrates me. It might be the rare case of a Lattafa that is abstract and therefore complex, or it might be that what this scent is going for is something like the scent of driftwood on a winter’s beach, in which case it nails the brief. Spun as a citrusy, woody ‘ambergris’ beachcomber scent, I get it. I can see that. Try to sell me Musamam White Intense as a creamy-milky-coconut thing, though, and I start to believe that most of the people reviewing it are either full of shit or are aping the review below them out of fear that what they are smelling must be ‘wrong’.

Eau Suave by Parfum d'Empire

Eau Suave smells like a slice of summer rose chypre heaven, with its dried rose petals, blackcurrants, and peach slices dipped into a glass of cold white wine so flinty it makes your teeth feel funny. Every chypre gets its essential character from the thrilling vein of bitterness that snakes down its backbone like a pointy nail, and here the trick is performed by a dry, suede-ish saffron. I love its dark, winey bite. Its charm begins to fade somewhat when the rose turns pompom-ish and 'ordinary'. Make no mistake, Eau Suave is fabulous stuff and I'd gladly wear it over any of the candied, creamy rose fragrances out on the market - it's just that its brilliant metal shimmer dims too quickly for it to remain evocative. Paestum Rose scratches the same itch for me as Eau Suave, so as long as my last bottle of that lives to see another day, I don't need to buy Eau Suave. Similar vibes, however, therefore I feel a little easier knowing Eau Suave is out there, waiting.

Santal du Pacifique Eau de Parfum by Perris Monte Carlo

Perris Monte Carlo, as a house, doesn't get as much respect - or discussion - in fragrance community circles as Parfums de Marley or Montale, mostly because they don't seem to pander to any of really 'bang on trend' DNAs like the creamy-rhubarb-lychee rose of Delina, the spun sugar Ambroxan of Baccarat Rouge 540, or the rubbery, scratchy tonka-oud bases of approximately 56 Montales (e.g., Arabians Tonka). But what Perris does is both simple and special - they write twisty love poems to a single note, by and large laying off the sticky aromachemicals, and by doing so, turn out stuff that, while seemingly simple, are a pleasure to wear. Santal du Pacifique is a case in point; a thick, 'hot', oily-creamy sandalwood accord shot through with salty floral accords, like violets and honeysuckle dipped in salt and strung around a margarita. I'd call it semi-tropical for its humid, almost sweaty depth, but as with all sandalwood-dominant fragrances, there is always something lumber dry tugging at its corners.

It's also a very 'large' smelling sandalwood, filling every room you walk into with its santalol richness and creaminess, which for me means that this is heavy on the Ebanol and Javanol fillers, the creams, the milky smelling salts, the whole nine yards modern perfumery has to go to in order to recreate the glory of real sandalwood, which though similar in scent profile, is always a much quieter thing. And that's ok. For what it's worth, sandalwood replacers all smell great to me, though I know there are some for whom they stick out like a pin on an inside seam. Still, for me, Santal du Pacifique is a really great 'smell' and if you didn't already have a good, rich, modern representation of straight sandalwood, then I'd say it is a close call between this and Profumum Roma's Santalum, the former of which is more floral and looser, and the latter of which is quite myrrh-heavy (a churchier, most austere take).

Cheirosa 59 by Sol de Janeiro

This is a guilty pleasure of mine. While the body cream for this smells like thick, vanilla buttercream frosting piled two inches thick atop a Victoria sponge, the body mist is more nuanced, with a minty pop of violets and anise giving way to a clean, lumber-style 'sandalwood'. It is quite sweet, in a gummy, fruit pastille kind of way, but the woody notes tone it down considerably. If you liked Nirvana Black and rue its discontinuation, then this is a creditable stand in.

It's a body mist, not a perfume, so not only do you have to be able to deal with a tacky plastic bottle but you have to be ok with any scent at all evaporating from your skin in two to three hours. I layer it with the body cream and spray it on my clothes and hair, but even that only buys you another hour. I have given up wearing this at work, therefore - I work 12-14 hour days sometimes and though no devotee of the longevity Gods in general, I do like to be able to smell myself for most of that time - and reserve it for bed or for my rare trips to the gym.

Arso by Profumum

Imagine a polished wood floor, freshly sanded, carpeted with a thick under-footing of pine needles, the warmth of the room releasing the green but also brown sugar-tinged aroma of the pine. It smells and feels dry, but also like sipping on a glass of whiskey. Beyond the faint breath of beeswax or cocoa butter lurking beneath its woody skein, Arso is almost entirely linear, and none the worse for it. It smells like a simpler, 'gooier' Chêne by Serge Lutens, actually.