Santa Maria Novella’s Marescialla is one of only three fragrances in the ‘interesting and ugly-beautiful but almost too brutal to love’ category that I keep around and wear on a regular basis –…
I fought tooth and nail to get my hands on a vintage-ish bottle of Annick Goutal’s Heure Exquise, and each time I wear it, I am less and less convinced that the juice…
Serge Lutens’ Ambre Sultan is the Elvis Presley of amber fragrances – it’s left the building, but its influence is still felt everywhere. Its sugar rush of resins playing tag with dry, aromatic…
Raven by Teone Reinthal Natural Perfume (TRNP) is the kind of rose chypre that hasn’t been in production since the 1980s – big, tart roses spread strewn across bittersweet, glittery balsams and a…
Ladamo by O’driu smells like a Christmas craft store – scads of thick, velvety dirt, fallen apples, mulled wine, grated ginger root, the whole nine yards – but without the nasty chemical edge…
There’s no mistaking En Avion as anything other than a Caron. Everything comes from a well-established rulebook – flip to page ten for the stinging clove topnote of Poivre, the smoky, medicinal…
I don’t mind the soft projection or poor longevity of Cittá di Kyoto, but what I can’t forgive is its vagueness. It is mostly iris – that rooty, plaster-of-Paris iris material that…
Sakura by Ormonde Jayne is a Venetian sunset in a bottle, a serene blue sky streaked with pink, apricot, and gold. It gives me the curious sensation of being relaxed and invigorated at…
Spyros Drosopoulos of Baruti is one of the most consistently original perfumers I have ever encountered. Baruti Indigo is a case in point. This is a perfume built on a series of weird…
Fragrances in this group – the patchouli deviations – tend to be more perfumey, abstract, and therefore more individual in character. Some of these deviations treat the patchouli as a fixed point…
I adore patchouli. But is it necessary for me to own every iteration? No, of course not (she said sternly to herself). My problem is that, because I love patchouli so much, I…
I love that in the promotional materials, Francesca Bianchi refers to the fact that champaca absolute has a fleshy, ‘human bodies’-like smell. It really does. In perfumery, champaca is managed in one…
Le Mat is a study in decrepitude. Picture a time-release reel of a rose blooming violently and then slowly desaturating in hue from a pulpy, blackened red to brown, dirty gold, and…
English Oak and Hazelnut is one of the most generic-smelling things in my collection but also one of the most mindlessly pleasant. It is the only Jo Malone fragrance I have ever bought,…
Dior Mitzah is a silky veil of vaporized rose honey, spices, and patchouli that pushes no buttons other than those of pleasure and comfort. And I am fine with that.…
Thoughts As of 2023, anyone stumbling onto Areej Le Doré for the first time might be a bit confused about what the house does and what it stands for. After all,…
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Unless it's Sundowner by Tauer Perfumes and then you're in for something a little more special and unexpected than your regular humdrum tobacco vanille-like take. …
Last installment of the Attar Guide to Earth, Herbs, Spice & Aromatics: Reviews N-Z,. If you love shamama attars, then you're in for a treat.…
The Attar Guide to Earth, Herbs, Spice & Aromatics: Reviews D-M. Lots of inky mossy stuff, as well as soap and spice and all things nice. …
The Attar Guide Earth, Herbs, Spice & Aromatics: Reviews A-C. Pungent patchoulis, sparkling saffron, healing herbs and amazing aromatics.…
The Attar Guide Primer on all the earthy, herbal, spicy or aromatic materials most commonly used in attar, mukhallat, and CPO perfumery. From charila, choyas, and patchai to bakula, saffron, and cypriol, if you…
Reviews of all seven fragrances in the Areej Le Doré History of Attar Collection - a triumphant ode to the beauty of Indian perfumery…
The Areej Le Doré History of Attar Collection is a reference 'smelling' library for those interested in the traditional attar genre…
Amouage's new attars ≠ the OG attars. In fact, they are not attars at all but niche perfume oils. And they're good but not $540 good.…
Smyrna by Le Couvent is a peppery rosewater scent that feels like Rose Poivrée or Rose 31 soaked in stain remover and run through a hot cycle. …
Iris Malikhân by Maison Crivelli is a dissonant, borderline unpleasant and weirdly habit-forming fragrance that is only nominally about iris. …
Rozu by Aesop fills a Rozu-shaped hole in my heart that I never even knew was there. A fresh-earthy-spicy-woody rose that gives me joy. …
Iris Ghalia by Ensar Oud pits a silver spoon iris against the great unwashed hoards of zoo animal secrete. Somehow, just somehow, it works.…
Chypre Sultan by Ensar Oud is a proper chypre, by which I mean that it smells like a chypre, not that it is at all proper (which it is not). …
Vaniglia by Santa Maria Novella smells reasonably like posh gelato in the air but like burning black plastic on the skin. (Minority opinion). Sometimes I like it, sometimes it gives me the dry heaves.…
Gatsby 22 by Ormonde Jayne is a fresh, citrusy floral musk that's definitely not for me but perfect for a modern-day Daisy Buchanan…
The secret to Cuir d’Iris is that it is simultaneously sooty and wet. Bone-dry cedarwood and iris kick up dust eddies as stale as the air from a newly-fired radiator. Floating in this…
Reviews about attars and mukhallats for my Attar Guide aren’t conjured out of thin air. When I write about a Sultan Pasha or an Abdul Samad Al Qurashi oil, I come armed with…
Fiore d’Ambra by Profumum Roma is the rare amber that confronts rather than comforts. Which makes sense, because it's barely an amber at all. …
Shalimar Millésime Vanilla Plantifolia by Guerlain is a lot of words to say 80% Shalimar spliced with 20% of an expensive niche bakery vanilla like Lira or Tihota, but I am surprised at just…
Casablanca by St. Clair Scents is a tour de force of the indie BWF (Big White Floral) perfumery, perfect for modern day sirens and sexpots.…
Fresh but dark, bitter and woody-musky, Libertine Neroli by Francesca Bianchi is a fantastic neroli-oakmoss chypre that nods at 1950s classic masculine perfumery without getting pulled into it completely. …
The Attar Guide: Resin Reviews K-T wraps up the Resin portion of the Guide, with some very mediocre indie oils bringing up the rear. …
The Attar Guide: Resin Reviews B-I covers of the most barn-storming, sturm-und-drang incense scents in the genre. Frankincense, myrrh, benzoin, and amber arm huffers and shirt-cuff sniffers, come get your resin freak on.…
The Attar Guide: Resin Reviews 0-A is the 50 Shades of Amber (and Amber Absolute knock offs), which, I guess, is as good a place to start as any. If you love the…
The Attar Guide to Resins - a brief guide to the difference between myrrh and sweet myrrh, frankincense and benzoin, and what even is amber anyway? A sweet and smoky exploration of sticky bush…
Aquilaria Blossom by Areej le Doré X Agar Aura is a woodsy citrus-oud-leather scent that surprises with its simplicity and lightness. Remarkably uncluttered for an oudy scent, and with only minor floral facets (an…
Wrapping up the Oud section of the Attar Guide now with a final set of reviews, this time specifically looking at oudy concentrated perfume oils (CPOs), which run the gamut from the bougiest of…
Oudy Mukhallat Reviews: D-W, covering some of the most beautiful oudy mukhallats ever made and others you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.…
Hera by Papillon Artisan Perfumes is a surprisingly abstract, resolutely non-literal take on the theme of a bridal perfume. As complex and as bittersweet as marriage itself, rather than the picture perfect shininess of…
Reviews of oudy mukhallats A-C, with an aside on cultural misappropriation in the attar or mukhallat world. …
Empire des Indes by Oriza L. Legrand is a soft, spicy opoponax scent that stands out even against the gazillion other opoponax perfumes I own…
Civet de Nuit by Areej Le Doré X Sultan Pasha is a collaboration between Russian Adam of Areej Le Doré and Sultan Pasha - a retro floral bomb with a purring civet and lascivious licked-skin…
The Attar Guide's Pure Oud Oil Reviews: P-Y features great examples of how creative distillation techniques can produce big surprises! From an oud oil by Rising Phoenix Perfumery that smells like a double espresso…
The Attar Guide's Pure Oud Oil Reviews: L-O looks at oud oils that range in aroma from wild mint, baked lamp, and soot-blackened walls to truffles, cèpes, myrrh, aged patchouli, humus, prunes soaking in…
The Attar Guide's PURE OUD Oil Reviews: D-K covers some of my very favorite pure oud oils ever, from the stunning, honeyed Medieval panforte of Agar Aura's Hirta and the honeysuckle floral-ishness of Ensar…
The Attar Guide Pure Oud Oil Reviews: 0-C. Kicking off the oud review section with PURE OUD OIL reviews. Oud, the whole oud, and nothing but the oud, so help us God. No fillers,…
The Attar Guide: The Different Styles of Oud. From berrylicious Cambodis and feral Hindis to sparkling Borneos and jungly Maraokes. …
In Part II of the Attar Guide Oud Primer, we ask: why does oud smell the way it does? Species, terroir, manner of cultivation, distillation techniques - they all play a part. Like with…
Oud, glorious oud. Part I of the Attar Guide Oud Primer, addressing the most common challenges that a newcomer will face when exploring oud for the first time. From the challenge of accessing samples…
Part II of II: The Attar Guide's sandalwood reviews from P to S, covering everything from an exceptional Ava Luxe take on the classic Guerlainesque animalic-wood of Jicky, a couple of surprisingly satisfying sandalwood-like…
Part I of II of reviews of sandalwood attars, mukhallats, and CPOs. Everything from Mysore marketing shenanigans in the indie oil sector to slightly dodgy souk oils and the real deal from artisans like…
A primer on sandalwood - what makes it smell so special, the different types, the availability of Mysore sandalwood, alternatives to sandalwood, and the role of sandalwood in attar perfumery. …
Chapter 28 of The Attar Guide: Ambergris Reviews G-Y, in which we explore ambergris attars that smell like everything from fruit rot and coconut to resin and mucked-out stables.…
Chapter 27 of the Attar Guide takes us reviews of ambergris-focused attars, mukhallats, and CPOs from A to E, and from stinky fishing tackle to the silkiest white chocolate souffle and even a roll…
Chapter 26 of the Attar Guide, and we're talking about ambergris. First a primer. to be followed by reviews of ambergris-focused attars, mukhallats and CPOs. An attenuated version of an article first published by…
Chapter 25 of the Attar Guide: Floral Reviews (T-Y) - the last of the Floral Reviews and the last of the Attar Guide in 2021 - compares, inter alia, several Abdes Salaam Attar attars…
Chapter 24 of the Attar Guide: Floral Reviews (S) takes us from a room-busting 1970s-style rose chypre by Al Rehab that costs peanuts to the rare Sultan Pasha attar that got the better of…
Chpater 23 of the Attar Guide and we are in the P-R section of the Floral reviews, so gird your loins for lots and lots of rose this and rose that (and a couple…
Chapter 22 of the Attar Guide: Floral Reviews (M-O), featuring, inter alia, a very passable Noir de Noir dupe, a feral narcissus attar that may cause sexual hysteria and a perfume pretending to be…
The Attar Guide: Floral Reviews (J-L) takes us on a tour through several really trashy Malle dupe oils, mega-expensive jasmine niche oils, and some sublime gardenia attars by Strangelove NYC and Sultan Pasha. Read…
Eidyya (Amouage) Type: mukhallat Eidyya, a mukhallat presumably linked to the celebration of Eid or the giving of gifts for Eid, is a potent floral affair with a deeply…
Badar (Al Haramain) Type: mukhallat Badar is a honey-forward mukhallat that sounds more exciting than it really is. (It also looks more exciting than it is, packaged as it is…
007 (Hyde & Alchemy) Type: concentrated perfume oil No. 007 is a little bum fluff of a thing – a peachy honeysuckle that leans waxy rather than green or fresh.…
Oriental Musk (Kuumba Made) Type: concentrated perfume oil Oriental Musk is a light, clean musk built around the idea of Egyptian skin musk but spruced up with some spice in the…
Kama (Ava Luxe) Type: concentrated perfume oil Kama is a musk fragrance with a briefly fecal topnote that sees it frequently compared to the famous Muscs Khoublai Khan by Serge…
010 (Hyde & Alchemy) Type: concentrated perfume oil No. 010 is a pink-smelling scent with a cheerful cherry blossom note pitched halfway between fruit and flower. The opening is not half…
From here on out, we are going to go material by material, grouped according to the most important scent families for attars, mukhallats, and concentrated perfume oils. Each section will start with a…
Musk in perfumery Musk is one of the four great animalic bases of perfumery, the other three being ambergris, civet, and castoreum. When smelled in isolation in their pure state, all four…
The final category of oil perfume is that of concentrated perfume oils. You might get to this section and groan. After all, are attars and mukhallats not concentrated perfume oils? The short answer…
Although I will be doing a much deeper dive on both sandalwood and oud in their respective sections, I wanted to use this chapter and the previous one as an introduction to the…
Sandalwood and oud are truly essential oils, in that they are the building blocks of their respective styles of perfumery. In traditional Indian attar perfumery, fragrant materials are distilled directly into sandalwood oil,…
Now we come to Middle-Eastern mukhallats. First, let’s get etymology out of the way. The word mukhallat simply means blend in Arabic and refers to a mix of pre-distilled attars and ruhs…
Complex Indian attars are the result of a multi-distillation process, whereby several fragrant materials are co-distilled in the same deg or created by mixing several distillates and attars together after distillation. In…
Traditional Indian attars (and ruhs) can be divided roughly into two groups. First, there are attars made by distilling a single material, like, for example, rose or vetiver. (These are the subject of…
Attar – an old Persian word for perfume (ațr, pronounced atir) – is the world’s earliest form of fragrance still in existence today. The word ‘attar’ is used in some form in most…
One big misconception I have come across while exploring the world of oil-based perfumery concerns purity. Attars, mukhallats, oud oils, and concentrated perfume oils (CPOs) are, technically speaking, pure perfumes because they do…
Alright, before we get into the fun stuff, let’s get the practicalities out of the way. Certain questions and concerns consistently pop up when people start getting into oil-based perfumes, such as: How much…
The longer form of that question being: why wear an attar or oil-based perfume at all when there are plenty of perfectly good spray perfumes out there? Actually, there are several reasons. …
Chapter 1 of the Attar Guide: An introduction…
I have yet to come across a review that captures what Le Labo Iris 39 smells like to me, so I’m going to take a run at it myself. Despite the advertised violets…
Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez have an extraordinary turn of phrase, don’t they? One of the many things they have written that has lingered in my mind for years is their description of L’Eau…
The fact that something as weird and borderline confrontational as Anamcara by Parfums Dusita was workshopped in a Facebook group known for its strict ‘say something nice or don’t say anything at all’…
Evernia by Ormonde Jayne takes its name from Evernia prunastri, the species of lichen from which oakmoss absolute – the star ingredient here – is obtained. It is interesting that Ormonde Jayne, one of…
I was going to start this review by saying that despite having studied French literature in college, my only experience with Baudelaire was with his poem Les Fleurs du Mal, but then I Googled…
Ormonde Elixir is 45% Ormonde Woman, 45% Ormonde Man, and 10% oud oil. I’m not mad at those percentages. The oud smells like the real deal has been used, and in more than holistic…
I blame my workload for a lot of life stuff that just doesn’t get done, including, inter alia, regular exercise, parenting that extends to more than rubbing their little heads fondly as I pass…
For all that vetiver famously possesses an olfactory range stretching between hazelnut, roses, and earth, it is always unmistakably ‘vetiver’ in the same way that patchouli is always patchouli. You’ll notice, therefore, that descriptions…
Based on my sampling of three perfumes from the Argentinian brand Frassaï, I can say that this is exactly the kind of thing that one hopes to see from modern niche perfumery…
The indie perfume brand Neandertal boasts some of the most achingly cool bottles I’ve ever seen, one of the hottest talents on the indie perfumery scene (Euan McCall), and several glowing Luca Turin reviews…
Iris Perle Username checks out. In its totality, Iris Perle is an opalescent soap bubble of freshly peeled mandarin over soapy-waxy-fatty mimosa clasped in a child’s slightly sweaty paw, but studied closely…
Vanille Havane Vanille Havane is an undeniably good smell. How could it not be? It is basically a Greatest Hits tour of some of the most feelgood smells in modern niche…
There are three types of tuberose fragrance and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Category I is Photorealistic Tuberose, which is where you find the dewy ‘ripped from nature’ takes like Carnal Flower (Malle),…
I keep trying to sum up Spell 125 by Papillon Artisan Perfumes for myself in one of those snappy two-liners that Luca Turin excels in, but it is a testament to the perfume’s shape-shifty-ness…
Gold is the most challenging of the gifts of the three Magi, of course, given that, unlike myrrh and frankincense, it is not a fragrant material in and of itself. I could write about…
Each of the gifts of the three Magi carried a special symbolic meaning – gold representing kingship, myrrh foreshadowing the death of Jesus (myrrh being commonly used as an embalming and purifying ointment in…
Myrrh is the sulky emo teenager of the resin family. From soapy to waxy to mushroomy to medicinal, let's do a deep dive on this most recalcitrant of resins. …
Mining the same marshmallow-meets-campfire vein as By the Fireplace by Maison Martin Margiela, albeit only about a hundred times more pleasant and natural-smelling, Blackmail captures that exciting feeling of anticipation your tummy gets at…
Copper Skies Sometimes you want a silky pâté that rolls around velvetily in your mouth for a few seconds before dissolving into perfumed air, and sometimes you want the thick, meaty savor of a…
Kintsugi by Masque Milano smells the way those mysterious salted fruits and chutneys in an Asian restaurant taste – perfumey, bitter, and dark in a way that sucks all the moisture out of your…
The challenge for any reviewer in reviewing the Areej Le Doré releases is that (a) either you’re late and the perfumes you’re writing about are no longer available to buy, or (b) you’re on…
What a beautiful and refreshingly to-the-point fragrance. In the tinderbox of nowtimes where the fuse is short and the flashpoint just a meter downwind of someone having a bad day on Twitter, Hongkong Oolong…
A common assumption in evaluating all-natural fragrances – thanks in large part to the Cult of Raw Materials that has sprung up around top-tier artisanal, distill-it-yourself houses such as Bortnikoff and Areej Le Doré…
The more I wear Sticky Fingers by Francesca Bianchi, the more I’m convinced it is the Bengale Rouge of the Bianchi line, by which I mean a deliciously thicc n’ fuzzy oriental that’s characterful…
Neither of these 2016 Ormonde Jayne releases – Jardin d’Ombre and Ambre Royal – are my kind of thing, even though there are interesting and even beautiful moments in both of them. But I’m…
As you might have guessed from my recent series of posts, I am a big fan of the house of Ormonde Jayne. After having invested in several full bottles and having worked my way…
Ormonde Jayne set out its mission and values in its original core collection, and to this day, it remains the standard bearer for the brand. I’ve written about some of the perfumes in the…
The topnotes of Serge Lutens Serge Noire‘s smoky, dried fruit incense draw me in every single Goddamn time, like a mermaid’s song. And then I am dashed cruelly against the rocks that are this…
Rose Gold Rose Gold opens with a fiercely fresh green rose that briefly hints at the rose in Ta’if before folding its lemon-rind-and-black-pepper topnotes into the folds of a richer, pulpier rose that smells…
Ormonde Jayne Four Corners of the World collection upped the ante on the already amazing core line, exploring key raw materials drawn from, well, the four corners of the earth: oud from India, tobacco…
Ormonde Jayne is a brand that I turn to for sophistication and polish. I'm looking past the core collection of original releases and asking: what did Linda do next? Part I is on the…
Quasi Un’Absurdia by Chris Rusak is a rare joy. In the modern hodge podge of brutal woody ambers and syrupy eau-de-department-store florals, instances of classical beauty are few and far between. So a minute…
I’m fascinated by the individuality of the models at play in the indie perfume sector. Some houses, like Diane St. Clair and Papillon work slowly, releasing an average of one perfume a year (if…
Mxxx. by Eris Parfums is an almost embarrassingly sexual scent – the result, I imagine, of an experiment to cross breed the silvery, driftwood aroma of a far-off beach bonfire with the boudoir-ish scent…
I don’t know how to say this without sounding condescending, but one sniff of Eve and Pandora, the new duo of perfumes from Diane St. Clair, is enough to tell that there has been…
Although I’ve always worn make-up, my reasons for doing so have varied dramatically over the years. As a teenager, my first and only concern was to make my face into a blank mask to…
Fallintostars by Strangelove NYC is clever because it pairs the 15th century smell of Hindi oud – the dank, rotting, wet wood smell of animal hides piled high in a medieval dungeon – with…
Douleur! by Bogue, a collaboration between Freddie Albrighton, a tattoo artist and erstwhile perfume blogger, and Antonio Gardoni, the beloved beardie of Bogue Profumo, has already garnered quite a bit of reaction on the…
Have you ever been walking along the street and suddenly feel so good that you burst into a run? Zoologist Bee is that for me – a burst of positivity that settles on you…
Hiram Green Voyage 2019, huh. I remember little of the original Voyage other than (a) I liked it a lot – or at least enough to spend €25 on obtaining a precious 5ml decant,…
The amount of depravity Francesca Bianchi subjects orris root to, I don’t know to be scared of meeting her in a dark alley – or take her out for an Aperol Spritz. People are…
I used to think that fragrances were like books, in that the more you experienced, the more your mental library expanded. But that’s not true. When I read a new book, the bookshelves in…