Vanilla Barka
Amouage (2021)

Vanilla Barka, composed by Dominique Ropion, is guilty of what Luca Turin named the ‘one-liner tendency’ in today’s niche perfume market, which is the fashion for composing a perfume around one of two headlining materials and allowing that be the whole artistic point of the fragrance. Imagine a scale of compositional complexity with L’Heure Bleue (Guerlain) at one end and Vanille Benjoin (Affinescence) at the other, where the closer you move towards Vanille Benjoin, the more ideas your perfume sheds. Vanilla Barka is positioned right at the Affinescence point on that scale.

After one thrilling note of frankincense, in all its silvery-lemony severity, this devolves very quickly into the plain white sugar + vanilla-tonka bean sludge you see everywhere from Tihota (Indult) to Vaniglia (Mazzolari) and even, to be honest, Vanille (Molinard). It is slightly plasticky, albeit in a nice way, like Vanyl (Bruno Acampora). You can even get reasonable versions of this accord from indie oil perfume houses, like Solstice Scents, and have it work out at $18 for a 5ml bottle. Vanilla Barka costs $540, for scale.

Vanilla Barka is far from unpleasant, just to be clear. There is a not insignificant amount of hygge to be mined in its deeply doughy, almost almondy dollhead embrace. But let’s be honest. Wearing Vanilla Barka is the scent equivalent of eating white frosting or raw cookie dough straight from the packet, while mindlessly binging Netflix in your slouchiest sweatpants. Yeah, it’s insanely comforting. But you also kind of know it’s not good for your teeth or your IQ. Not to mention that, for $540, you can pick up two whole bottles of Tihota. Of course, Amouage is counting on Dubai mall foot traffic not to know about Tihota. So, there’s that.