A Girl in Needles:while Fille en Aiguilles may allude obliquely to the coniferous in its nomenclature, this hugely idiosyncratic scent effects direct and unambiguous transportation, setting you down on beaten brown needles heaped between the fluted boles and cones of afternoon pines.  If you cannot picture what that looks like, you can at least smell its every detail.  Commes des Garçons barrelled down a different road with their one-note wooden wonders and they were justly acclaimed but Serge built something far more symphonic in FeA.  I love it for a fistful of aesthetic and personal reasons and even if you don't, there’s little point in denying this fume’s savant-level expression of an ideal so often fumbled and belaboured.

The conifer note is such a tricky bitch to fold into a wearability and even more difficult to incorporate into a sophisticated composition, a hitch rooted in the distance between its material reality (harsh and often inorganic) and emotive northern expectation (holidays, jingle bells), to say nothing of its degradation in the bowels of toilet spray and cleaning products.

FeA wipes all this baggage off the table and presents us with xmas pine’s much hotter southern cousin, deeply tanned and slyly feral, embodied in the aged grove of Monterey Pines that lean out over the sunbaked bay across the road from my house.   

From a sensory point of view they are most alive in summer, their volatiles tempered by a dose of dusty fundamental clay, blown brine and the sneaky green of the largely acrid weeds that survive their shade.  In warm weather FeA speaks their very particular dialect, breathing a blast of bright citronella, gouts of glutinous sap clogged with sugary crystals, sharply crushed bark and saline caramel that dries down in a shallow trajectory, arriving at a softer version of this spacious accord.  Wood, heat, still, sweet; FeA lures me time and again from the back of the perfume stand with this fourfold warmblooded promise.

While I wouldn't call it a difficult wear a la infamous stablemates Muscs Kublai Khan or Miel de Bois, like many things Lutensian this fume kicks hard in the wrong hands.  A hot wrist can ballon it into glorious simplification- just smoky honey rubbed hard into spiced green wood- but the wrong kind of sweat can turn it rank, sending the sweetness nasty and homolactic.  I'd caution against the Fille under damp cuffs or on an oily skin in summer.  It's also potent and rather tenacious, one spray lasting all day and three turning it into a throat-wringing, Poison-level thug- please don't be tempted.

FeA shows another face when autumn lapses into winter, offering meaningful consolation to those who might despair of their ability to do it justice in warmer weather.  I love how it speaks for the neighbouring grove when the trees themselves fall silent, becoming dry to the point of austerity, substituting all that expansive vernal sucre for weathered, ghosting cedar that somehow swings wide of incense, attenuate vanilla and a suggestion of wild thyme and iodine- in short, the smoke of summer’s brighter fire.  While there's no real change to the skin scent, colder days tamp that potentially monstrous sillage in an effect like smelling just the sleeping coat of some furred animal rather than the full suite of notes in its active presence.  I can’t decide which face I prefer, but am grateful for both. 

Where scent is concerned, beauty sometimes keeps strange company.  It might lie all dewy and recumbent amongst petals- exactly where we might expect to find it- but more often than not it smiles at us from some oblique quarter, all the more welcome for such ambagious disclosure.  Such is Fumerie Turque, a juice that sits so pale and unassuming in the glass that the curious can find themselves chewing on a little more than they expected, in common with other Lutensian lovelies.  There's not much backwards in its forwards, but I'm not complaining; life's too short to tolerate equivocation.  

Turkish smoke implies a single dominating note, even to those with no knowledge of latakia tobacco or any other substance that might contribute to such a thing.  And that's what you get, to some extent; the fumes from a brazier fuelled with fragrant wood and maybe damped with sheaves of anise.  But that's not all, and it doesn't play out in the way you might expect.  Fumerie Turque divides into embellished halves and their expression is inverted away from natural expectation; the smoke is induced to curl up and cleave to the wrist, and it is the hearth's sweet, charred bones that are offered to the distant admirer, by way of scented woods and haunting resins.

My initial impression of the skin scent is that of burning rubber, a elderberry-purple acridity that cracks you in the face right off the wrist.  Don't let this deter you; a moment of force majeure is required to deliver the rest of its hefty payload, including the broken flesh of liquorice, that packet of Camels that breathed at you from his shirt pocket when you put your arm around his neck, and oil-stained, sunwarmed saddle.  Synaesthetic impressions lie a little further south of the Bosphorus than the title implies- I get the deep, inky-stained colours of Moroccan or Tuareg leatherwork, perhaps, or maybe lattice shadow in the alley outside a hammam if one is to draw a more literal inspiration.  Coincidentally it shares these gothic flavours with the subject of my last review, Norne (Slumberhouse), although it is a drier and more tasteful version of that potent nocturne, its laurels resting in cured leaves rather than on a green plant trampled by a must-wracked sasquatch.

As far as the listed notes go, suede and tobacco are plain enough, providing the scuffed matte warmth of leather and the delicious little stink of unborn smoke.  It's sometimes possible to detect dusty old camphor, as when the lid is lifted on a fabric stash; there is even that faintest suggestion of the parched and weary fibres of the silk that's stored within.  If juniper, chamomile, patchouli and currant were bound together and sharply compressed you would doubtlessly end up with the aniseed and liquorice accord, something faintly disturbing and boiled-down into a witchy black compound.  Tonka, styrax and honey align with true vanilla to form a sort of vanille chimérique, so much more brown, like the wizened titular pod, than anything you would scoop from a tub; Medjoul dates might be a bridge too far in regard to this element, but you get the idea.  

As I've already said, don't worry that everyone around you is being subjected to smouldering tyres or bossy sassafras.  FT proffers this lazy, sinuous sweetness to the bystander, my partner identifying aniseedy Smokers lollies and dried cherries in the sillage, going on to mention sweet leaves on a fire or perhaps a room fumigated with scented greenery- all surprisingly divergent from the more proximate experience. 

Emphatic it may be, but not bereft of surprises.  I've been wearing Fumerie Turque for a couple of years now and the other day was I startled by a novel burst of incense, similar to that so boldly expressed in Sonoma Scents Incense Pure; FT let go of its leather and lay back like an opium belle, breathing purring resins for two hours before stepping down again into liquorice and firesides.  Could it have been a change in my personal chemistry?  Bottle ageing?  Who knows, but I had never struck it before.  

FT favours cooler weather and a dry skin, so think twice about dousing yourself if you're likely to sweat.  Nor is it really for the meek and it would behove the uncertain to invest in a sample before going to the effort of sourcing a bottle, now that it's been made a Salon Exclusive (ie. more obscure and expensive.)  On the Lutens strength and projection scale I'd give it a 7.5, a little behind 10-monsters like Chergui.  As far as gender suitability is concerned, it's perfectly, perfectly androgynous.  

Perhaps the thing I enjoy most in Fumerie Turque is its transportive quality.  Unless, by some anomaly in the space-time continuum you are already standing in a somewhat romanticised 19th C bazaar, chewing the butt of a cigar and scowling at a dodgy syce while haggling for a brace of blood mares, FT is pretty much guaranteed to take you there.  If you know what I mean.

While I know what I like, I also enjoy being blindsided by abject and complicated strangeness.  When ordering from somewhere like Indiescents, I trawl the sample options like a perverted maniac, looking for something that'll piss me off or prompt me to abandon a long-standing olfactory relationship in its rakish favour.  Slumberhouse had me at slumberhouse and I picked two enfants terrible from its contentious archives, prised Norne from the package, blew it onto my wrist, toughed it out for an hour and then ran to the bathroom like a little bitch to scrub it off.  A week later I tried it again and came back with nope.  Another attempt brought me round a small distance and got me questioning the depth of my own reaction.  Was I really mad at Norne for being a tall dark fucked-up stranger?  Who am I?  So I went a few more rounds.

Like many good things, Norne is immensely aberrant, especially at first.  It yawns wide open like a lifted slab, full of latent, moonless lycanthropy, offering up a richly phenolic bucket of neat liquorice, damp saddle, black tar something, peaty malt, signal fire and refrigerator vegetable bin feat. celery.  Scraped-up moss and shovel handle, distant aniseed and molasses tins drift in and out of that dense equation.  After half an hour fresh white sawdust creeps under the door as the aggressive tar and vegetable elements collapse, and this develops further into the smell of dressed timber, roasted, savoury caramels and brown liquor and cola-breath huffed against a neck.  When taxed for his opinion of the surprisingly moderate silage, my partner muttered dried fruit and cinnamon, which confused me, but maybe there is an analogue in the molasses note.  Then he said warm horse.  Writing this an hour later leads me to reassess the tail which is both lengthy and indeed a lot more aromatic than I remembered, with lowball powdered cinnamon, maybe sandalwood and the ghosts of nameless conifers emerging.

Every time I consult Norne in its first half hour I am enclosed in a beetling ring of old-growth trees that exclude the sun and stand buried up to their titan waists in a thousand years of moss and lichen. The visual association is immensely powerful; I can't lift my wrist to my nose without seeing tannic forest colours, feeling water around my ankles and being reminded both of the sound of an approach and my own breathing.  To me, that is pagan, deeply erotic and very welcome.  These mental and emotional transports are rare, their value completely distinct from that of a scent's aesthetic worth.  Full marks to Norne in this respect, and also to its aforementioned depravity; it is almost autoerotic, inverted and careless of spectators and if it was devised as some sort of upskirt voodoo delivery system, it certainly rings the dirty bell in my Pavlovian experience.  

Is it perfect?  No.  I'm not averse to gritting my teeth and dousing myself in something completely fucked for the sake of art and/or pretension.  But I feel there are some flies in this ointment and that they are not just questions of personal taste.  Volume is one; Norne is too fucking loud on the skin.  Even on a half-squirt this juice shouts I am Norne in my face like someone with tuna stuck in their teeth.  This may be the extrait strength talking and while I wonder if another, more volatile embodiment might help, I also suspect this scent would lose too much to alcohol.  As it is, it makes no constructive concessions to your personal chemistry, getting up to buy you a drink and coming back with a huge neat Pernod.  Sometimes sarcastic generosity gives you all kinds of wood and sometimes it just engages your headbutting impulse; the chasm between wrist-experience and sillage is problematic in my humble opinion.  And on a hot day it can sour and turn horribly green- I mean horribly- and this comes from someone with dry and annoyingly sweet skin.  Under these circumstances Norne can morph toward that dread strain of smell that I feel many men are anosmic to, namely the low, pungent mouldy scent of stinky towels hung too long in a damp place, of cotton Tshirts not completely dry when they were stuffed into a drawer.  In my opinion, while Norne is hotly courageous and deeply creative, it would flower into perfection given a modest technical revision.  Apparently the dark juice stains, but that depends on your wardrobe.

Muscs Koublai Khan.  Prrrrrrr.  Some say eeeek, but then there are two sorts of people in the world when you think about it; those who embrace their own biology, and those who find our mammalian reality discomforting and even repugnant.  The latter haven't been backward in coming forward in regard to that repugnance, which annoys me; as with Miel de Bois, Muscs Koublai Khan has been unfairly and rather childishly slated as some kind of stinky poopoo monster.  I stand firmly in the former camp; it's not that there's nothing funky about a hot day on a crowded bus, but I just can't throw out the baby with the bathwater- the smell of an agreeable member of my own species delights my sensibilities.  The memory of someone with skin that smelled of gently-warmed beeswax, a buttery, rolled-gold scent that rose from his hair and neck when he sat in the sun and loitered in his clothing like some sort of plush phantom; more beautiful to me than any champaca absolute.  My partner's sweat is redolent of his indelibly personalized masculinity and I would not be without that intimate reminder.  So yes, to cut that shit short- I am a musk-rat.  A skank bunny.  A pit-sniffer.  And I love Muscs Koublai Khan.    

Which is ironic, really, since I don't find it animalic.  If I was looking forward to smelling like three hours with two guys in a yurt, I found only traces of any glandular/mustelid element, and am by no means anosmic in that direction.  MKK opens in a brief kick of sharp, vaporous aromatics that soon loft its buxom substance into a surprisingly modest projection.  The minky civet, castoneum, cistus and ambergis unfurl together, worked into something fat, silky and deeply luxurious, slapped hard and flushed pink by the rose notes and lazy, recessive patchouli.

Some find only skunk after this point; I think they might be sniffing too hard at the wrist, mistaking the skin scent for the sillage in its sophisticated and quite divergent actuality, but here we come to something everyone should know about perfume- your skin is no passive receptor.  If you're a hottie, a sweater, one of those dewy, slightly moistened creatures, expect MKK to turn dirty and head for the stables.  My own personal upholstery converts the darkest, rankest raunch to powder puff faster than you can say doh I was hoping for sex, strongly favouring the pink, silvery fur aspect of musk and the grubbier flowers; thus I am treated to rosy/lolly/fox collar rather than any triple X throwdown.  Quel dommage.

Another quarter of an hour passes before something almost arcane occurs, the compound sweetness morphing to almost exactly resemble the scent of batik application, sere notes of scorched cotton and hot wax supported by the increasingly ghostly musk.  This accord rolls slowly onto its side to reveal what is to me the hidden heart of MKK- a whispered, mythic analogue of a lover's scent, memorialized, hung with flowers, framed in the doting, mote-flecked gold of a late summer afternoon, incarnate at long last, but private and intimate.  All the best fumes have this quality of intimacy, of personal relevance; the ability to move and remind, and MKK is the queen of them all in that respect.

I'm finding it difficult to imagine a more unisex scent and perhaps this will provide a clearer picture of its comprehensive organic affinities.  I get four to five decent hours before it settles down and closes its eyes, but it lingers for weeks on your clothing.  Don't let anyone talk you out of Muscs Koublai Khan.  Its beauty is a rarity in commercial perfumery- a substance verging on the personal.  If you can appreciate McQueen's Kingdom, Kiel's Musk and some of Serge's dirty girls like El Attarine or even Arabie, you'll be wondering what all the hot fuss was about. 
Images my own- please do not reproduce.

When I'm looking for a new fume, either I research the thing with pathetic, almost pitiful caution, consulting the experts, prodding the hivemind, stalking it for months before even comparing prices and actually breaking out the plastic, or just shrug nihilistically and dump it in my online cart, hands in the air like I just don't care.  The idea of Byredo Pulp as some sort of semi-literal fruit-based facehug really appealed to my grabby inner impulse monkey, gorged as I was on the Lutensian stewed and dried compotes and hankering for something a little more jeune, something weird, fresh and immediate.  But I'd never (well, hardly) heard of Byredo as a house except to have osmotically noted the exorbitant price point- down here, $250 NZ for (admittedly) 100mls; I don't know about you, but that bites my arse like some sort of perverted hornet, ladies and gemmen.

What to do?  Sounds great... costs far too much... might be absolutely horrible... remember the last time you fell for the fructose fairy?  Fate intervened in the shape of a small decant, so I took the plunge anyway.

If I had imagined I would enjoy a squished mess of fresh fruit notes, I was dead right, though for reasons oblique to my vague expectations.  Pulp opens for me in a suckerpunch of sliced red capsicum and wooden chopping board, a bristling vegetal ambush.  I presume that is the slightly pissy combination of the bergamot and blackcurrant dicing with the lurking cedar; this little contretemps goes on for around ten minutes on my hand before taking it outside and settling in behind what is for me a buxom conjugation of juicy tropical notes, both compressed and broken open.  Instead of the nominated figs and pommes I get mangosteens, sunwarmed pineapple and even funky jackfruit (distant jackfruit, luckily).  Lychee ducks in and out according to ambient temperature.  The space between your wrist and nose quivers with this louche, pale-fleshed orchestration though there is an abstract quality that almost fends off a gourmand designation.  Some have accused Pulp of plastic fruitbowl syndrome and while it flirts with this idea in an almost ironic fashion, I find nothing truly unlickable.  (In an interesting coincidence that might explain this division of opinion, I was in a local museum today rubbing and sniffing a piece of kauri gum (sub-fossil podocarp tree resin); as it released its volatiles, I smelled incense and balsam while a friend found only the sharp stink of early plastics.  And we were probably both right.)

There is some morphing over the next few hours with the various characters hoving and bulging in a slow and pretty lateral progression but generally speaking, Pulp delivers on its promise of mingled drupe, syncarpet, pepo and hesperidium, shot through with shards of greenish savoury goodness and favoured with a bottom rounded outward by backstage caramel.  The tail is lighter, settling into a respectable stony, monotonal peachiness.

As a whole, it is a fat, persistent (5 hours intact) scent that offers moderate projection/silage, though this is very dependent on the number of sprays applied.  Pulp is a notional, modernist fruit arrangement, more at home in the collective unconscious than the breakfast bowl and make no mistake, there is ugliness buried in the squishy depths of its screwed-up, almost visceral expression.  I enjoyed both this explicit counterpoint and its diagonal revision of a played-out genre and will most likely invest in a larger decant or 50ml some time soon, $$$ notwithstanding.  But if you prefer your fumes pretty, traditional and right-thinking, it's probably best if you allow the price point to deter you.

HOUSE  Serge Lutens
STYLE/FLAVOUR floral/soliflore
DATE OF ISSUE  2000
LISTED NOTES rose, geranium, clove, vanilla, gaiac, honey, musk.

Rose soliflores, in fact soliflores in general, do not speak to the very core of my being.  Perhaps I can make an exception for A La Nuit, that soporific, sloe-eyed jasmine, and for a good champaca- if I am ever to find an example of that elusive paragon, since it seems doomed to cloying, pandering adulteration.  What is a freaking soliflore anyway, you might well ask; literally, it is a scent based on or consisting wholly of a single nominated flower, a conceit that many find tiresome given the fact that virtually nothing smells exclusively of itself.  You might conclude that this endeavour often ends in gakky disaster, and you would be right- tuberose (it burns!) and vanilla being much abused in the tortuous pursuit of simplicity.

Having just qualified my initial statement into oblivion, I might as well go the whole hog and admit to enjoying Sa Majesté la Rose, if not to the same extent as, say… Muscs Koublai Khan or… quite a few other things.  Equivocation is annoying, isn't it?  I agree, wholeheartedly.  But I just don't know if I can love a simple singleton; I need layers, enigmas, imponderables.  Should my exorbitant requirements colour your own opinion of such an expertly composed and well-executed scent?  Probably not.

Sa Majesté opens with the best of all possible roses.  Serge himself references Turkish, Bulgarian and Moroccan sources which suggests the inclusion of both rosa damascena (heavy, fat, fruity) and rosa centifolia (bright, sweet), the basis of those respective harvests.  The scent is truly a thing of hybrid perfection, collating all those narrow, fractionated ideas that we have gathered and stowed and arranging them in an authentic sequence.  We are greeted with cloudy dawn pink and feather-grey top notes that express the first taste of a new flower still quartered in its native thorns.  There is bloomy purple fruit threaded with a notional honey, more like deliquescent sweetness than the mellifluous substance itself, devoid of any skunky complexity.  Clasping this central emphasis is a cold, limpid note of dew supported by the fibrous, wooded bitterness of fresh sap, the shaded green of leaves and the ghost of the cool dirt at the feet of it all, a loamy darkness anchoring the velvet hum.  The rose is the story and there is not too much else to report; I find that any flanking notes owe much of their presence or absence to temperature and detect a nip of carnation and a smudge of white musk on a warm day.  Honey and sleepy clove fire up slowly in the tail.

HOUSE  Hermès
STYLE/FLAVOUR oriental fougere.
DATE OF ISSUE  2006
LISTED NOTES peru balsam, vanilla sugar, amber, sandalwood, tonka bean, patchouli, siam resin, caramel, oak, incense, orange peel, cedar.

I often only glance at one or two reviews before buying a new fume, since, as I might have already mentioned, I prefer not to load myself with other peoples' expectations and disappointments.  Thus I came to Elixir des Merveilles without any preconceptions, apart from the side-eye I reserve for Hermès as a house in the round; they have never impressed me beyond their ability to induce certain people to pay alarming sums of money for possibly the ugliest bags on the planet.  Slow clap for that, I suppose.  I mean, Ambre Narguile is solid enough without being distinguished; there are a few others that were... pleasant... inoffensive... but that's part of the problem, is it not?  Their fragrances tend to not even bother me and that is almost incontrovertible evidence of mediocrity, no matter where your tastes happen to lie.  All this fuss is of course ephemeral to consideration of the perfume in itself and was something that merely confirmed my impression after the fact anyway.

Elixir des Merveilles is a pungent detonation from the moment it escapes the glass and wraps around your head, a spongy wad of dirty, syrupy, slightly decomposed citrus; rubbed kaffir lime, bruised lemon blossom, the last mandarin in the bowl - you get the idea.  Accompanying this dubious melange is an almost aged if not decrepit vanilla, battered with a plank of splintery sunbaked resin.  This fume is thick in almost every possible sense of the word; something to choke on- something to get both hands around- something that might need help finding its way home, and while it hoes the same row as other monster scents like Lutens' Chergui and the original Poison, it doesn't share their IQ, having more in spiritual common with Clinique's Aromatics Elixir, that drooling sleeper-hold of a thing, that infant migraine in a bottle.  It doesn't so much smell like the former pair as possess their frightening tenacity and penetration, so keep that in mind when considering a second spray.

Along with all this fuzzy, dense citrus comes something grey and I can't quite put my finger on its origins since I'm still pretty much smelling what I did half an hour ago.  Yes, Elixir is what you might call linear, so much so that it really just oozes slowly forward in a spineless kind of way, banging on the jellied orange like a favourite toy until you want to crawl out of the window or at least hit the mute button.  Wherefore art thou, alleged cedar, because I'm gagging for you at this point.  After half an hour or so the fruit bowl starts to sag and you're permitted a small peep of something drier, a flat amberous resin struggling through a vanilla turned both lactic and melon-y (yes, ew), a smothering toffee and something resembling bad rum and raisin icecream (I'm picking fake sandal and budget tonka) that have squeezed into a world that's starting to feel like the satin-lined interior of a white stretch limousine.  Possibly not the intended destination.  The whole thing settles into a decidedly MOR fly-spray amber in the end, the orange rising, undead, in dried peel form like a piece plucked out of a chai blend and wedged forcibly into one nostril.

So to summarize, Elixir des Merveilles is inorganic, asphyxiating and inarticulate.  There, I've said it, and I feel much better.  And for the price ($100+ 50ml) you can do so much better that I don't even know where to begin.  That's not a popular opinion; the darn thing scores 100% on Basenotes, but I'd rather swallow the bottle than spray it on my wrist.  Yes that is an exaggeration, but the sentiment remains.
Available online, if you insist.
© céili o'keefe.  

HOUSE  Sonoma Scent Studio  (I've decided to abandon the star-rating system; it's too blunt a tool and personal preference isn't a measurable quantity anyway.)

STYLE/FLAVOUR incense/oriental

DATE OF ISSUE  March 2010

LISTED NOTES  frankincense CO2, myrrh EO, labdanum absolute, cistus oil, natural oakmoss absolute, aged Indian patchouli heartnote fraction, sandalwood, cedar, ambergris, orris, angelica root absolute, elemi EO, vanilla absolute. 

ENVIRONMENTAL & ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS Recycled packaging elements, synthetic instead of animal musks/civet/castoreum, no sunscreens, preservatives, colourants, parabens.  Sources sustainably grown ingredients where possible.  Close attention to batch freshness.

STAR RATING *****
HOUSE  Sonoma Scent Studio
STYLE/FLAVOUR amber/ unisex.
DATE OF ISSUE  Aug 2008
LISTED NOTES  labdanum absolute, amber, rose, olibanum, myrrh, vetiver codistilled with mitti, oakmoss absolute, aged Indian patchouli, Texas cedarwood, sandalwood, clove, castoreum.
ENVIRONMENTAL & ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS Recycled packaging elements, synthetic instead of animal musks/civet/castoreum, no sunscreens, preservatives, colourants, parabens.  Sources sustainably grown ingredients where possible.  Close attention to batch freshness.


Like many of the best things in life, I discovered Sonoma Scent Studio at random via a sample of Ambre Noir, bought stone-cold online.  I've been getting into niche-ish fumes for a few years now, gorging on Lutens' epic back catalogue and snuffling around various other houses largely without prejudice, having known nothing of their reputations or the degree to which they were esteemed or execrated, and not really caring about those things anyway.  

I do remember gazing at that little gold vial of Ambre Noir and thinking it looked special.  But haven't we all thought that as a prelude to disappointment?  In my native cynicism I expected something… polite, if not pedestrian, another of the many homely MOR ambers milling about of late, possessing neither the lofty, piercing austerity of Serge Luten's Ambre Sultan nor the lolling, open-robe cornucopia of Parfum d'Empire's Ambre Russe, or even the bitchy smokers' croak of that hoary ashtray amber still padding the shoulders of good old Opium.  

Instead it was amber, but not as I knew it, and I was more than happy to be slapped out of my preconceptions.  AN's point of difference is both positive and negative; the convex mass of its strengths and its judicious exclusions.  I adore it for both.  It is polite; it has the perfect manners of a heavily-replete tiger lying with its head in the shade.  Always a good thing.

To my nose, labdanum and a dense contralto rose step out together in almost chivalric mutuality.  They float patiently over your wrist while you ponder their balance; visually I find them merged into a limpid golden orb, and sliding past this full-blown lustre come the first reports of smoke, muslin-white and humming notes learned in the spice isles, arranging them in the same low key instead of barking them into your face.  I was charmed by this restraint; there is something about amber that seems to prompt such shrill excesses from those attempting to kick it in some new direction at the expense of its inherent values.  Thankfully AN does not suffer this unlovely syndrome.

At this point I instinctively brace for the banality of synth vanilla, that gloopy moderator, that dimwitted olfactory debutante smothering development with her triple spanx and polyester.  (Full disclosure- I love vanilla as it really is, that parasol flower smiling over a twisty, sticky gack that shares its roots with vinegar or cyanide.  I own a jar full of primo island pods and I huff it on the regular.  But I do not love the 'soft serve curdling in a rum puddle on a hot footpath' accord of say, Spiriteuse Double Vanille.  That stuff is whack.)  Never mind about the vanille horreur; she never really shows.  Instead we are treated to a waft of myrrh and arid cedar, their sere assurance ushering us past the prospect of vulgarity.

Next come a small detachment of those green and bitter creatures crowding A Sultan, turned way down so that they merely twist about your ankles instead of fuming round your ears.  Forest-floor allusions, a small black taste of broken marigold and the stringent end of sandalwood.  For me, the ride ends here; the tail goes on in the same alluring vein.

Beauty should never pander and AN does not; from unfolding and revealing, it persists without apology or meaningful degradation for the best part of the day- expect 6 hours intact, 12 hours of residual goodness, a good month on your clothing.  Presentation is tasteful and utile; a black embossed box and heavy, stable bottle that has so far resisted all my fumblings.  If like me you shudder at the fiscal prospect of your next acquisition and wonder how much longer you can defer those boring essential domestic repairs or elective surgeries, you may be pleasantly surprised by AN's price tag.

I will be reviewing Incense Pure from the same house in the near future.  Another stunner.

Get it- online outside the US.  See site link below for retail outlets.
Sonoma Scent Studio