Velvet Haze
Byredo (2017)

Mmmm! Top notes have me interested - ambrette seed and coconut water. Perfume-y yet like a refreshing beverage of some sort. Kind of like a fine, expensive candle fragrance, too.

The heart and base though, seem to be altogether different. The patchouli is invisible to me. Cocoa note & musk have a gourmand flavor. The cocoa isn't sweet; it's not quite bitter either. There is a strange, vague note that reminds me of gardenia, as it rests on my skin a long while.

3 stars.

I didn't get much typical coconut in Byredo Velvet Haze, at least not anything cloyingly plastic like some coconut-flavoured products can be. Instead, it's creamy, warmly sweet, slightly honeyed and animalic, evoking a bowl of hot milk to me during the first 20 minutes.

Then, something vaguely inky and metallic, yet still somewhat velvety, starts to infuse the hot milk and cools it down. It felt familiar, but I wasn't able to name it until 1 hour later, when it firmly dominates and the sweet milk becomes merely a facet of it: a clean, vegetal white musk, halfway between the musty one in Byredo Blanche and the brighter, more floral one in Narciso Rodriguez for Her EDT. The main difference being the addition of the sweet milkiness, Velvet Haze feels kind of like a semi-gourmand variation on the clean white musk theme.

From then on, Velvet Haze doesn't change much anymore. Sometimes, I can smell a bit of coconut milk within the mix, but it's mostly just abstract velvety milky sweetness among the inky white musk. I don't detect any distinct bitterness of cacao or patchouli on my skin, although the spikiness of the later was detectable during the middle phase on the paper.

I get a medium sillage during the first 3 hours, and it stays close to the skin for another 6 hours.

Without digging into any musical or cultural background, the name itself actually summarizes well how Velvet Haze smells to me: a velvety, hazy white cloud of clean inky musk with a subtle creamy sweetness, which fits well into the abstract, modern artificial style of Byredo fragrances that I tried so far. I would recommend it to those who enjoy clean, abstract fragrances, especially to those who'd like a warmer, more creamy version of Byredo Blanche or Narciso Rodriguez for Her EDT.