Top: violet accord, cardamom. Middle: iris, ambrox. Base: cedarwood, leather, sandalwood.
Sandalwood scents are very hit or miss to me. I always fear that I'll end up smelling like my mother or *gasp!* a resident of a hippie commune (come to think of it that also describes my mother).
At first I didn't get the hype. I'm going to be honest it did not agree with my skin at first, it sort of dissipated into nothing after about twenty minutes and I never got that beautiful woody bloom that everyone goes bananas over. It felt like a case of olfactory blue balls.
But, because I wanted it to work, I kept wearing it, tried applying it to different bits of my anatomy, using different methods of application... and then one day it worked.
Reader when I tell you I had a come to Jesus moment, I mean the angels started singing.
When it first goes on it smells like a shoe store. There's a very profound and nearly offputting leatheriness to it that mellows out into a subtle spice before blooming into this pure sandalwood wonderland. The cardamom is definitely present on me which offsets some of the more jarring acidity I find in a lot of sandalwood scents. The cedarwood tingles, right there, at the base of the whole thing, a steady base holding everything up and grounding it at the same time. It goes out as a sigh that smells of my grandmother's linen cupboard and the cedar shavings she'd store them with to keep the moths away.
The silage is enormous, and the staying power endless. Some other reviews I read said that it's now so ubiquitous it's almost the smell of the air in certain parts of NYC and London and I can see how. After wearing it for a few days off and on it's still everywhere. Even after laundry the cuffs of my shirt still smell of it, my watch band, the makeup bag I carry to work with me, my hair, my pillowcase. Working as I was each time with a tiny dab from a 1ml sample vial, if sprayed I can only imagine it would be strong enough to block out the sun and incite a bacchic frenzy in anyone within a 13-mile radius.
It's truly gender-neutral. It's sweet but not cloying, woody but rounded, warm rather than sharp. I wouldn't go so far as to call it creamy but there is a softness to it, a well-loved sweater kind of softness that is tempered by the edginess of a truly gender-bending profile (none of that gourmand skew that a lot of sandalwood scents "pour femme" seem to like and nor any of that awful put-upon musk that seems to be the only thing anyone can come up with to make a scent "pour homme"). There's honestly nothing complex about it. It's a minimalist dream, it is exactly what it says on the tin and is all the more luxurious for its simplicity.
The hype is absolutely real.
*dives into a pool of this scent. Never to return*
9/10 -1 point for its ubiquity.
Everyone loves this scent, everyone wears this scent. I need to be original or I will perish and in the circles I run in? this is as trite as a June wedding or calling your art "poststructuralist" because it doesn't actually mean anything and you know it.
The beaten dead horse of the fragrance scene. But it was, once, the world's most beautiful horse. May it rest in peace.
