Opus XV - King Blue Amouage 2023

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7.1 / 10 76 Ratings

Opus XV - King Blue is a new perfume by Amouage for women and men and was released in 2023. The scent is woody-oriental. Projection and longevity are above-average. It is being marketed by Sabco Group / Oman Perfumery.

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Main accords

Woody

Oriental

Leathery

Animal

Smoky

Fragrance Pyramid

Top Notes

Blackcurrant

Mandarin orange

Pink pepper

Heart Notes

Amber

Frankincense

Base Notes

Assam oud

Leather

Oak wood

Sandalwood

Patchouli

Perfumers

Alexis Grugeon, Hamid Merati-Kashani

Ratings

Scent

7.176 Ratings

Longevity

8.872 Ratings

Sillage

8.470 Ratings

Bottle

8.764 Ratings

Value for money

5.747 Ratings

Submitted by Omrfrq, last update on 04.12.2023.

Reviews

4 in-depth fragrance descriptions

11/28/2023

6
Pricing 10
Bottle 8
Sillage 8
Longevity 4
Scent

SeoulBrough
12 Reviews

SeoulBrough

3

What Is Going On?

Received King Blue today.

What the hell is going on with this?

It’s not the oud that bothers me in this fragrance. Yes it’s kinda fecal within the first five minutes, so what…no problem. It moves from that stage rather quickly. It’s everything else built alongside of it. This fragrance is all over the place. There’s no cohesion and I don’t find this blended well. The blackberry, smoke, frankincense and oud are isolated and going in different directions. I like harmony in my fragrances.

I’m going to give an updated review in thirty days, but so far, this is a very polarizing scent.

Hey…if you like it, then I love it.

07/25/2023

2
Pricing 9
Bottle 8
Sillage 9
Longevity 6
Scent

NicheOnly
34 Reviews

NicheOnly

1

An exponential decline in profile from the minute you put it on

In-doors test with a sample I got from Jovoy.

Opening: Aromatic, slightly sweet. The sample instantly gives me the same vibe that I remember getting when I first sprayed on Opus XIV - Royal Tobacco - the top has a licorice-like note driving sweetness to it, very comparable to Oud for Happiness. On initial impressions *just in the air*, I absolutely love it. When I first smell it up-close, I get a fairly mild, wearable oud. After smelling it up-close just once, my nose resets and I notice that unlisted licorice top note is generating a massive cloud around me.

But the decline in profile is exponential. After just 1 sniff up-close and the licorice cloud, I felt like the oud part of this scent seemed disappointing for €455 - it seemed too simple. But at least the profile seemed worthy of an 8 or 8.5. But then it started to go animalic, and this is exactly the type of profile that I don't want - the dead/cooked fish type animalic that I instantly recognize from my most disliked scent of all-time being Hamdani. Oddly enough, this is my second time in the last week smelling assam oud in a blend. Parfumo hasn't yet listed these 4 scents, but in Masque Milano's Ruby Collection where they are dropping 4 oud flankers of their popular scents, the Oud flanker to II-II Mandala (Mandala Oud, not yet on the database) has this exact same vibe. The scent goes smoky from around 1.5-2 hours onward.

Performance wise, I would say it starts going quiet at around 10-11 hours. Sillage may open with that licorice cloud, but it is clearly nowhere near true nuclear scents. My TLDR is that it smells fine if you don't smell it up-close. And for anybody thinking this is more wearable than Jubilation XXV Man or that this smells like Baccarat Rouge 540 Extrait de Parfum... those statements are outrageous to the point where I got my head in my hands.

---

07/24/2023

5
Pricing 5
Bottle 10
Sillage 10
Longevity 10
Scent

Mercer
78 Reviews

Mercer

2

If Amouage made Baccarat Rouge 540

How I would describe King Blue:
__

(1) A more mass appealing version of Jubilation XXV Man
(2) If Amouage had created Baccarat Rouge 540 Extrait de Parfum

_

1. This feels like a more mass appealing version of Jubilation XXV. Remove the blackberry note from Jubilation XXV and replace it with strawberry...and tone down the resinous, incense heavy, spiciness of your classic Amouage DNA and you have King Blue.

2. Add amber, frankincense and patchouli to Baccarat Rouge 540...and you have King Blue. That sweetness, it's so similar to BR540. Like how Omnipotato described in their review, that cotton candy quality is here, but none of that medicinal element that people sometimes describe as a bandaid smell. Just the sweet notes of BR540 that you smell in a silage cloud

There is nothing BLUE about this at all. When I'm smelling a fragrance I instantly see and associate it with a color, this to me screams:
-- red from that sweet candied strawberry / BR540 aura
-- orange from the resinous amber
-- black from the dark incense vibe that is classic Amouage DNA

The price is pretty crazy, and I hate these bottles from Amouage. This should have come in the Interlude 53 bottle.

07/21/2023

8
Pricing 10
Bottle 9
Sillage 9
Longevity 10
Scent

Omnipotato
25 Reviews

Omnipotato

Helpful Review 4

A Leather Oud for Kings!

The press statements for King Blue are pervaded with language of contradictions - the real and the unreal, the impossible and the mundane, fire and nightshade. The main oxymoron present in this fragrance is the meeting of sweet fruits and amber, and smoky leathery oud.

On first spray, you get a whiff of the mandarin and blackcurrant. However, these are not juicy photorealistic fruits but rather bitter and dark representations. A little later, the saffron-y amber emerges and adds a bit of sweetness, but not a vanillic creaminess, more like the sharp burnt cotton candy vibe of Baccarat Rouge 540 Eau de Parfum.

Then the real star of the show appears: a smoky and leathery oud that in my head seems like a combination of Epic Man and Opus XIII - Silver Oud. Many have already compared King Blue to Silver Oud and there is definitely significant overlap in the oud accord in both. However, King Blue adds so many more dimensions. Another fragrance that is similar is Haltane which has a similar saffron note that gives the BR540 impression. However, the oud in King Blue is of a much higher quality.

Overall, I think this latest addition to the Library Collection is a worthy successor to Silver Oud, and I can see it becoming one of my favorite oud scents of all time. The oud is toned down enough by the other accords to not be in-your-face and heavily animalic, but it is also not the clearly synthetic ouds used in Haltane, Oud for Greatness, Oud Wood Eau de Parfum, etc. One of my new favorites from the house of Amouage.

EDIT 8/23/23: Each time I put this on I'm getting another dimension of this fragrance. The first time, which is when I wrote this review, I mostly only got the leather and oud from the start and the fruitiness was not that apparent. The next time, I got more of the mandarin orange. When I put it on today, I got juicy, almost bubblegum-y blackcurrant! Which dried down into the wonderful smoky oud that is of course the star of the show. I am loving this fragrance more and more with each wear. Possibly one of my favorites of all time now.