Red Crown Extrait de Parfum
Auphorie (2017)

Red Crown is a perfume of many stages and a long evolution. It opens as a feathery, carried-on-the-breeze creation that seems to be following the marketers' guidelines for perfumes supposedly appealing to the East Asian segment – up to a point. Such concoctions are usually created with soft floral and citric notes, unsullied by spice or animalic dirt, and are not too intrusive.
Red Crown has the requisite gentleness, with the floral theme mildly fruity in order to evoke the fruit tree blossoms mentioned in the notes, which don't actually smell of much at all themselves. Here the effect is a bit artificial and gum droppy but not unappealing. And it is paired with a pale woods theme (bamboo is mentioned in the notes), giving the whole a cool, almost aquatic shimmer. But Red Crown is an extrait and its presence is much more evident than the lighter, cologne-like offerings pitched at the East. There's an undertow of sandal, salt and sun-tan lotion giving the requisite weight. And a hint of smoke.
Then in the mid-section, the limpid feel of its opening gives way to a pretty blurred floral, and for some reason I kept thinking of Amouage's Secret Garden offerings which seem similar in spirit. And I must admit, much as I'm an Auphorie fan boy, at this point there seems to be much more of the boiled sweet in evidence than of blossom.
The next shift results in my favourite phase, where the bamboo grove theme of greenish woody notes re-merges, with the floral notes opening up and twinkling within, and a backing suggestion of something from a herbal apothecary's cabinet. It's a complex layering of elements, given the kind of spacious treatment it deserves.
In the deep drydown, however, there is a surprising change and a closing in, with the emergence of a rather clotted white floral (mainly tuberose and jasmine to my nose) with the coconut aspect that often accompanies. That kind of thing is not my style at all and, overall, through all of Red Crane's twists and turns, I found that, while it intrigued me, it held back on sensory indulgence.
All of the above is now academic as Red Crown is sold out on Auphorie's web site.