Beloved Man Amouage 2013

I have always found Amouage as a fragrance house quite interesting; I wore Reflection Man up and down for some time until I imagined I was getting headaches from it (sometimes I just overdid it) and then sold it again.

What I find super interesting about Amouage is that many fragrances are quite complex, and at least I often sit down and ask myself, "What in this fragrance gives it this character?" At the same time, most fragrances are very powerful, especially Memoir Man and Interlude Man are good examples of how dark, gloomy, and grim Amouage can be.

At the same time, there are also things that are "easy to wear," such as Reflection Man or Beloved Man.
Reflection Man smells very clean, modern, and well-groomed to me, but it feels a bit like a hard break from tradition with Amouage (although that is probably intended; Reflection Man was the first Amouage created under Christopher Chong's leadership). The goal was probably also to show that one does not want to be stuck in a specific cultural identity. However, Reflection Man feels almost too far removed from Amouage itself for me. This means that if you want to know what Amouage is really good at, you might want to neglect Reflection Man.

Fate Man, for example, I find really good; it has really extreme contrasts, "raw power," and a kind of celestial aura (in English, I would use the word "celestial," not "heavenly"; I think "celestial" has a tendency towards the otherworldly, the divine). But the fragrance is very polarizing and not really "easy to wear."

Beloved Man somehow manages to bridge the gap between "easy to wear" and the values that Christopher Chong has, namely that a fragrance should not only be a good composition of its components but also convey a story and/or emotions.

Beloved Man opens for me fresh and woody, with a combo of incense and citrus, sometimes also a bit with a somewhat beeswax-like accord (--> Iris + the sweet components probably). The character of this opening feels crystal clear and defined; afterwards, Beloved Man transitions into the sweet and soft.
I can understand where the comparison with 1Million comes from, but in my opinion, the fragrances are not really similar; Beloved Man feels too elevated and is much more reserved in terms of volume.

The woods, the sweetness (it's not vanilla; I would guess tonka bean/coumarin and/or heliotropin), and the rest are more or less united into a rather generically appearing and hard-to-define entity. Probably because of this, comparisons to other fragrances come up from time to time. Today, while wearing Beloved Man, I occasionally experienced hot flashes, although the sweetness was quite good at firing up; sometimes I even had to think of Le Male).
Nevertheless, Beloved Man has a certain Amouage DNA that one might recognize from the other woodier or incense-heavy fragrances.

I would recommend Beloved Man as a fragrance if you want an example of what Amouage is good at and which can also be worn casually without turning up noses among others.

At the same time, Beloved Man somehow feels "soothing" to me; the fragrance progression really conveys a feeling: that moment when you gain a certain insight and finally have clarity about a situation, so you can finally switch off your mind and sleep peacefully. It could be a flash of genius in the lab that finally gets the assay running and delivers a nice result, but it could also be that cozy feeling after a date when you get the confirmation that the girl is into you (and you go to sleep in the evening with a smile on your face).

Beloved Man manages to feel somewhat magical without being particularly demanding.

However, I must say that the retail price is absolutely ridiculous; I would never willingly pay that, no matter how good the fragrance or the storytelling behind it is.
But if you can get a good deal on Beloved Man, feel free to go for it; compared to other Amouages, it seems quite foolproof. But the fact that it is the most expensive Amouage is really a shame because I think it would be the ideal fragrance to introduce someone to the house of Amouage.