Individual fragrances
the ones with no house here

This is an amazing fragrance, because it smells 1:1 with the balsamic vinegar of Modena (IGP). It is incredible how these people managed it. 1:1. Wow.

In the top, it is pure balsamic vinegar.

In the mid, it is replaced by cherry and some spices like cinnamon and maybe cloves. It becomes a little Christmassy in the mid.

On the dry down, it becomes smokier and sweeter, which eventually does settle into a general smell of vinegar. It is different from the opening, where it really smells like Modena vinegar specifically.

Something to note with this fragrance is that it progresses VERY VERY QUICKLY. The top lasts 30 seconds to a minute, the mid lasts about 5-10 minutes, and then the dry down is achieved within 50 minutes. The whole thing is gone by 3 hours.

This is a fragrance that if they managed to fix its longevity and make the character of each individual part of the pyramid last longer, it would be a feat unlike any other. I mean, recreating balsamic vinegar specifically from Modena is a feat as it is, but still, I do wish it lasted a bit longer.

I have also met the owners of the house, and they were as excited about their achievement as I was about the fact that there is a Modena balsamic vinegar fragrance. They were really nice, so shout out to them.

This is a brilliant fragrance. It is a fragrance that is sad and mournful, yet I can also frequently interpret it as being hopeful. This contrarian approach comes from the fact that it smells like wet flowers in the cold (of which the most prominent are the chrysanthemums and violets).

The sad and mournful perspective seems to be the most popular, as this fragrance does evoke that funerary melancholy: the smell of the tombstones, the patch of earth and the flowers brought out by the gentle rain. It is cold, and the skies are overcast. Someone is gone.

And the hopeful perspective is one of spring: when winter decides to retreat and the protests of the cold get louder and louder. Flowers bloom and the luster of the dewy violets appears testament to the fact that the rays of the sun have broken through the dense overcast skies of February. The smell of the earth and its contents is magnified by the gentle rains that fall; not maliciously, but to spite the white and gray. Winter is over, and spring is here.

The makeup of the hopeful perspective are three ingredients: the residual cold of the winter, the wonderful smell of blooming flowers, and the wet character of the rain and the earth. This is the perspective I prefer personally.

It is also a linear fragrance. It doesn’t change. Maybe I would say that it turns a little soapy if I were to be nitpicky, but otherwise no, it is linear. It is also incredibly simple, which makes it very enjoyable.

This smells like a whole biome present within some brown forest. It has the flora, the fauna and the setting itself too.

The fragrance is by no means linear, but I feel I would not be doing it justice to represent it on a 3 point pyramid of top mid and base; it contains so many things one could find in a forest that I would be at a loss to document them chronologically parallel to the development of this fragrance.

Overall, I can say, that this fragrance smells like the response of a forest to when it rains. You can smell the soil, the mushrooms, the rogue chamomile flowers and other herbs that grow by the footpath, the breeze that wafts through the spruce and cypress, the deer and other animals that go drink from a pond as well as the pond itself, the beehive and its wax and honey, and the resins of the trees. There is so much to this, and so much of which I probably have not mentioned.

If you think of a fragrance that is most holistically depicting a forest, this is easily the number one choice. In comparison to other works, such as the notable Murkwood by Pineward, this does not give you a snapshot of one moment in time in a forest, nor does it present you with an ideal version of what you would imagine a forest to smell like; no, this gives you the forest as is: vivid, raw and real.

It is aromatic, and dark, and bright, and pine-y, and complicated, and herbal, and green, and earthy, and animalic, and floral, and musky too. This is one of those fragrances that I genuinely to struggle to write anything about because of how much there is to say.

Incredible.

This Dior private line is a sweet and honeyed tobacco fragrance. As it opens, you get blasted with tobacco, peach and honey. It is generally quite linear, but some facets do fade in and out of existence, like the aforementioned peach, as well as citruses, hints of plum, and smoke (which is introduced a few minutes into the spray of the fragrance).

In my mind, this is a fragrance of one of those underground smoke lounges of the 80s or 90s, where gentleman would dress up in their 3-piece suits and play billiard together while discussing relevant sports events or politics. The rooms with the bison head mounted on the wall, and the ebony chairs that surround the lacquered table in the middle of the room. I can also see there being some painting, often ignored by the attending guests and host.

I can also see smelling as the inside of a speakeasy bar in London, somewhere where the access is known by a select few, whose tastes in tobacco and atmosphere have been curated over the past decade or so, and have led up to this exact smell.

Anyways; it is quite dense and yet has some airiness to it. The density comes from multifaceted tobacco, and the air comes from the smoke, the citruses and the plum. It is very sweet, but not in the conventional way that honey fragrances are, no. Instead, here the honey lends its sweetness to the tobacco and you end up with the illusion that the tobacco itself is what is sweet. From the honey, I noticed that there is very little to no wax character, which is a welcome subtraction. It is also very very warm and is one of those smells that makes you feel warm even when the temperature is way below cold.

It is a very pleasant and wearable fragrance, and I myself consider it to be my go-to for winter. Smell this one, why don’t you?

NOTE: Something to add is that the centerstage tobacco is a little more complex than the usual, and to my best of knowledge contains blond tobacco leaves, gris tabacco and the regular absolut. If there is more then I do not know.

Sweet and fruity! It smells like the best shampoo you will ever find. There is raspberry, green apple and violet made a little more fresher (and shampoo-y) with orange blossom. It is honestly really pleasant, and a way better version of something like Greenly by Parfums de Marley.

I can see why it is called flamenco: smelling this evokes the same emotions as when you are watching a flamenco show in Andalucía. The lights, the flashing red of the Flamenca, the rhythm of the botas flamencas against the hollow wooden stage, it is all there.

It is not a realistic recreation, because that would include sweat, and fire, and a lot less of the cute notes present in this formulation; no, this is the ideal version of it. If one were to participate in the dance and then draw it from memory in watercolour, this is what it would smell like: the colours smeared with the majority being taken over by the alluring red of the Flamenca. The act of painting drawing from the sweetness of a pleasant memory. (the fragrance is very sweet)

Generally speaking, it is non-linear; it turns denser, woodier and more musky as it progresses. Though, I find it important to note that this is a perfume that is affected by the macerating time and the temperature:

1. Maceration: this perfume changes DRASTICALLY when it sits on your shelf for some time. The first few months of spraying it, it lasts up to 4 hours if you’re lucky, and the character is mainly fresh. On the other hand, after a year or so of being on a shelf, this turns dense, sweet and can last for about 12-16 hours EASY.
2. Temperature: I find that in the summer, this is way fresher than in the winter. In the winter, it turns warm and dense.

This is a sunscreen fragrance, one which starts off with citruses, but quickly reveals facets of sweat and salt. It is a very true-to-summer as a sunscreen, and is really something you can imagine smelling if you did go to the French Riviera – the name nails it. It is a smell that evokes the life of the beach, rather than the lounging inactivity of high end luxury resorts: it is a smell of a shore full of occupied beach volleyball nets, and children playing with buckets making sandcastles, and the couples that brought rackets to play badminton, and the surfers who are almost out of sight on the far horizon.

I love this one because it is subtle too; it is not a fragrance that one would think is actually a fragrance. What I mean is that normally, if you spray yourself with ambroxan or oud, then no one will think that you smell like that naturally, but rather if you put on sunscreen, then it is a much more subtle way of smelling nice without having the effort of doing so be apparent. People won’t think twice about what it is that you are wearing, just that you simple “smell nice.”

It is non-linear, and as it progresses it does turn more salty and more ambroxide-y but I found this to be highly variable from skin to skin. On mine for example, I get a good 3 hours of lovely sunscreen before it turns to almost pure salt.

Made by Casa Goa, this is a fragrance that is inspired by the fog of London.

Top

On spray it is quite powdery and very orris-y and something that makes it feel wet and dense. It has a contrasting character of powdery from the orris and sharp from lavender. It does smell like the streets and byways of the city. It is cold in some sense, and it is also realistic. It smells like the scaffolding you might find, and the bricks that make up the houses and the road you are on alike.

Mid

Once it develops a little, it becomes quite a simple fougère; albeit it does include honey so there’s points for uniqueness there. It becomes a barbershop fragrance that is sweet and a little powdery. Also smoother than most other of its type. Maybe that’s because there is ylang-ylang, which would give it quite a milky texture.

Dry Down

When it dries down, it becomes a little boring, but still sweet and a little wet. I can still see this as being a London fragrance though; it is consistent in that regard.

Top 1

In the very beginning. It smells like burnt salmon barbecue. It has a distinct airiness that you would get if you over-seared salmon, it charred and you smelled the charred parts.

Top 2

The top of this has the DNA of wet smoke, the same way that Fumidus by Roma Profumum, albeit a little spicier and sweeter. It is not a complex sweetness, rather more so a simple vanillin.

Top 3

It loses quite a bit of the smoke character, and it starts smelling a little like nutmeg. There is also a notable leather facet here, which is also a top-note leather. The sweetness persists here

Mid

This did a 180 on the top note 2; and it became extremely pleasant. It is airy smoke; completely devoid of that aforementioned density. The vanillin was correct from earlier, it’s definitely there. Idk if there’s tonka. This is really cool.

Base

It becomes quite transparent.

Top-Mid

This smells like a synthetic forest. Not like a shampoo, but rather like a pretty high quality pine needle soap that was intended to be sold in an artisanal local shop. It does turn a little more true to the character of a forest a few seconds in; but besides that it stays true to the description above. In this transition, it turns darker, more resinous (oleoresinous). At this point, I feel I could mistake it for a pineward fragrance. It does not smell like one of them in particular (at least not to me).

Dry Down

Lost the strip - will come back to this.

Top

This smells a lot like the actual bark and its resins rather than the pine of a forest. And it is smoother than what I expected it to smell like.

Mid

This starts turning eerily similar to Murkwood from Pineward, except it feels watered down. Where Murkwood is intense and very much an in your face big-and-scary forest, this is the cutesy version of it. They both are dark, but Murkwood is darker. They both smell like pine, but Murkwood does it better.

Dry Down

Lost the strip - will come back to this.

Note

I would like to say that fir of the dark is a good fragrance. The way that I described it above feels a little pessimistic, but in reality, Murkwood just set some very high standards. If you like the smell of Murkwood, but see it as something too intense to wear on the daily, then this is something that I feel is a GREAT alternative, because it takes all the things that come with Murkwood and de-intensifies them. It also isn’t as sickeningly green and doesn’t ruin your clothes; so JMP, you definitely get plus points there.

This smells like the best iteration of a Turkish Delights store - the type that make the delights in front of you, with just the right amount of pistachio and pomegranate. It excellent presentation and excellent product. I think this perfume conveys that phenomenally.

I have also heard that this house uses vintage materials when it comes to its compositions; which I can feel with this fragrance. I honestly did smell the other ones too, but this is such a standout that I didn’t bother with the other three. Iris Soir was good, and Thebes was also good, but Joyeaux was mid.

Top 1: immediately upon spraying

This starts off very aromatic. It is characterized by a sort of bright abrasiveness similar to turpentine without the deep and dark oleoresin-y part of the character; it is a character of a shower gel that had too much fragrance molecules mixed into and turned too “bright.” I think the word “bright” is better here. The type of brightness is of the marijuana plant. If you were to imagine a sterile indoor lab which grows marijuana in a controlled setting, then that is what this would smell like at the VERY opening.

Top2: 5 minutes in

The marijuana dominates, there is some earthiness to it too, which is animalic for the main part. During this part, it starts turning into one of those classically “stinky” fragrances that are good in an artisanal sort of way, but realistically they smell like a shed that an animal died in.

At this stage, the animalics are most similar to Musc Ravageur by Frederick Malle, minus the vanillic aspects, and minus the sweetness. It is this type of smell that can be interpreted as piss, or something that vaguely smells of homelessness in a city.

Top3: 15 minutes in

The initial aromatic facets return with the herbal/marijuana-y aspects, but less bright and more aromatic. I can almost see this being a character in a non-classical fougère. It smells like the leaves of marijuana look (focusing only on the top notes though, as the lower and deeper parts of the perfume do not agree with that description. I don’t think I can describe the darker parts of this perfume, because of the blending. It feels blended phenomenally).

Mid: 30-45 minutes

It now smells creamier, whilst still maintaining some of that aromatic character mentioned in Top 3. It is now way more palpable. The cannabis is still VERY present. The piss/animalic facet persists here.

At this point, I can see it being a backyard glasshouse transformed into a marijuana farm (unlike the earlier sterile character of a laboratory with precisely monitored conditions).

At this point in the fragrance, I felt I could more accurately describe the darker parts of it, which I think are best described as being herbal. On the bottom, it feels like the weeds of a poorly controlled weed farm PLUS MOISTURE. If you were to take some random earthiness, add some tuberose, add some things like maybe benzoin, coriander or caraway seeds, and contextualize this as being in a field of marijuana, then that is what the base smells like (in isolation).

The more I smell it and think about it, it smells like a genuine weed farm (which for legal purposes I do not know what it smells like). If you look at the plants grow, and take everything above the ground by 10-15 centimeters and up, then that is what you get in the bright facets of this perfume; creaminess and marijuana; and if you look below that, and look at the stems emerging from the soil as well as the soil itself, then you will get the darker and deeper parts of this perfume.

An additional interpretation I would like to add is that there is warmth in this; in a way of being an accord rather than a characteristic, probably emerging as an accident from mixing resins and the herbal parts of Forbidden Flower. It doesn’t have the character of smoke, rather it is like very well oxygenated fire. The warmth feels weird in this perfume, but with the blending, one might not bat an eye. Or a nostril.

Dry Down: 5 hours

At this stage, it feels more refined, especially as far as the dark/piss character is concerned. That part is nicely settled. It is really nicely blended, and there is no one particular dominant note that saturates your nose when you smell it. For example, the cannabis is still very much there but it will not overwhelm you as before. It feels whole, and covers the entire spectrum from bright to dark.

When smelling it in the dry down, I smelled an airiness too, which I hypothesize are a part of the fragrance that does not quite go away but rather is something that gets separated at some point from the weed turpentine-y aromatics that you smell in the very top of Forbidden Flower (which explains their refined character, especially in the context of the whole scent profile, going from very clearly aromatic into subdued and airy).

It is the distance is what I found to be proportional to what it is that you smell, such that if you smell the perfume from afar (it had a relatively large projection at this stage) then you will smell the airiness, whereas the closer you get, then the more you smell the abrasive aromatics (but again; the aromatics are also more refined).

In the beginning, I stated that this could be a clinical weed farm, then I stated it could be a home-made weed lab, but now it smells more like a combination of both: airy character at distance and the still somewhat abrasive brightness when up close are two characteristics I would expect to find in a laboratory weed farm, whereas the general character not described by either of the latter feels like a weed farm at home.

Note: Very different on skin compared to paper. Worlds apart.

Note2: Very different in cold and warm environments. In the cold, it eans more into the marijuana sharpness mentioned mainly in the top notes; while in warmer environments, it feels that this leans more into being more dark and deep. The difference is huge.

Note3: Personally I did not like this. It is complicated, and it is very multi-faceted.

Top

Initially, this smells great. It smells like dark chocolate, but not sweet. I emphasize this because with most dark chocolate gourmands, they tend to go in the direction of sweet dark chocolate, but this no, this really holds off on it (at the very top at least). It does have a hazelnutty character, and some woods.

To me, this smells similar to Vestibule by Ataraxia, in that there is the freshness of a freshly made dark chocolate bar being snapped in two. In Vestibule though, it takes a direction of peppers and wasabi, and turns fine powdery and spicy; whereas Ore leans in the direction of a warm cabin with hazelnut flavoured hot chocolate (perhaps of the highest quality attainable). I can also compare this to By The Fireplace by Maison Margiela, but this is truly the mature and better version of that. Compared to by the fireplace, this is extremely well crafted, less sweet, less synthetic, less ambroxide-y, more chocolatey and truer to the hazelnut character. It portrays warmth way better than Maison Margiela.

Mid

At this point, I can smell smoke. It isn’t smoke in the classical sense, because it feels as an accord rather than a note. I cannot pick up on smoke, rather I can only say it SMELLS LIKE SMOKE. What I mean to say is that there are several notes (none of which I can truly identify, and many of which I suspect to be resinous components) that make up a part of this perfume that smells like smoke; the type that you might expect sitting in a log cabin somewhere in the woods, drinking that hazelnut flavored hot chocolate mentioned in the top notes. To describe the smoke; it most reminds me of Profundum’s Martyr, just less sharp, equally as sweet, replacing the vanilla with resins, and with an overdose of hazelnuts.

Shortly afterwards, the smell of resins takes over.

Dry Down

This turns into almost pure resins. It is more balsamic than classical resinous, and I would say that peru balsam is doing most of the heavy lifting. Some sweetness and a surprising hint of sourness that you might get when freshly starting a fire, which is really nice. It is also perfectly balancing an elegant gentlemanly warmth and a cozy near a campfire warm.

Honestly, I really like this.