Rose Rebelle Respawn
A Lab on Fire (2013)

This one is a chocolate rose to me. It's very slightly powdery, and I do so agree with minimal projection. I don't get any soap in the rose note, just a fair mix of carnation. Perhaps there was a bit of distraction with manicure concentration, but that says a lot--I applied the entire sample vial to skin and sat to file, push cuticles, etc.

I completely forgot I had a new fragrance on my wrists. Whoops. That's a bad sign. Putting my nose to skin it's quite nice--rose, carnation, dry cocoa, and a bit of warmth -- incense. I guess I missed the mint while I was accessing the evenness of my squovals.

It's all nice enough if you'd like a sheer skin scent and have excess cash you like to get rid of. Perhaps four hundred quarters in the bottom of your purse.

Rose Rebelle Respawn opens with slightly powdery dark chocolate cocoa with a tinge of underlying green. As the composition moves to its early heart the powdery cocoa remains, now supporting a soapy rose and powdery carnation starring tandem that quickly emerges to take the fore with faint early hints of incense from the base peeping through. During the late dry-down the rose and carnation slowly recede as the powdery cocoa and soft incense join slightly animallic musk in key support through the finish. Projection is minimal and longevity excellent at 12 hours+ on skin.

This is just a boring composition through and through. Quite frankly the highlight of this mundane composition was the all too brief open, where its typically forgettable powdery cocoa was distinguished for a split second by a difficult to identify underlying green accord before it was gone with all the hope of an interesting composition with it. What remains is an all too common combination of powdery cocoa, soapy rose and soft powdery carnation. The whole thing is quite linear and wholly forgettable. The bottom line is the $100 per 60 ml bottle Rose Rebelle Respawn is quite reasonably priced and has a well-respected nose behind it, but the end result is quite unimpressive earning a very average 2.5 stars out of 5 rating and a mild avoid recommendation except if you are a big fan of fragrances like Noir de Noir by Tom Ford but want more of a skin scent in a similar vein, in which case this one may appeal to you.