Nuit Rouge
Antonio Alessandria (2014)

A lot going on simultaneously with this one. Looking at the notes, I see why. 6/10

Sweetened rhubarb up-top with saffron and leather beneath, this thing gets your attention. It smells a little like a mashup of the first Aedes scent crossed with something like Matriarch's Blackbird. There's a druggy kind of narcotic quality to it that lends it more personality than the Aedes, but it still lacks character in the bigger picture as it just smells too much like other things. Not awful, but hardly memorable–it's a bit of an olfactory identity crisis.

I really don't know where to start here…

Ok, this is a woody spicy with super-trendy top notes. I smelled the woody-tonka-vanilla core accord basically in 90% of niche and designer fragrances currently available on the market but, beside that, the whole fragrance is a complete deja-vu. It smells somewhat nice if you're fine with sharp top notes and sweet woody bases but, seriously, smell this blind and you won't be able to tell it apart from most of the stuff overpopulating the fragrance market.

With that said, the problem here is not that Rouge Noir feels like a *copy* of something else. It more simply feels like someone has opened a perfumer's text-book and assembled a woody-spicy doing a pretty good job. It's well done, it smells competent but, in the end, it doesn't standout.

Meh.

The opening of Nuit Rouge is deceptively sharp and crisp (you'll read why I say "deceptively"): a bold note of rhubarb, with its peculiar sort of "vegetable-rooty-reddish" feel, well blending with the buttery note of iris, green notes, perhaps red pepper or carnation, spices (tonka for sure), resins, patchouli, vetiver, a light thin of polished leather on the base, with Iso E combining woods and incense. It all smells so undoubtedly "niche": it has that contemporary and crisp (and slightly depressing) "polished leather" note you find anywhere in nowadays' "élite" of perfumery, which is nothing more than a galore of safraleine that after a couple of hours always starts to smell like burnt rubber; it has a couple of "almost-unusual" notes (rhubarb, riding the small trend which seemed to arise around this note last year - following Jovoy's L'art de la Guerre, which is to any extent superior to this one); it *looks* creative basing on the composition; it smells "chic"... and it quite lacks in deepness, substance and interest, as most of niche seems to be happy with these days. This said, if you're into niche all of that would probably represent a "plus" to you - contrary to me – so let's talk about the smell itself. Nuit Rouge is (mediocrely) pleasant, elegant, "nocturnal red" as the name suggests, delivering a (mediocrely) refined, carnal blend halfway earthy, rooty, leathery and dark, but also slightly fruity and powdery. All quite in a plain way, as I said, but the smell is nice enough, at least at first... because all of that I ranted about above wasn't even the main problem, actually: the main issue with Nuit Rouge (and with all Alessandria's line) is that basically you can smell most of the scent clearly enough for less than hour. After that, most part of it it's gone. And you remain with a generic, faint drydown with a hint of leather and a pale ghost of all what was there before. And an empty wallet in your pocket. So, shortly, not a disaster, but... "more talk than action".

5,5-6/10