Creme de la Creme Areej Le Doré 2024

I plead guilty. Guilty of judging this fragrance far too early.
But let me start like this. I no longer buy anything blind - period. I've fallen flat on my face so many times now when it comes to blind buys and at some point I thought it made sense to take Einstein's quote to heart: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." and to always test beforehand, even though this also entails the risk of not being able to buy a bottle due to increasingly frequent, severe limitations.

To be honest, there wasn't much for me in Adam's last releases, but as I have been fascinated by Animalika since the beginning of my passion for fragrances, I had to at least test the entire Musk Collection.

So now I tested "Creme de la Creme" and was speechless... speechless because it smelled so boring. Somehow over-seasoned, somehow creamy and somehow like putty and I'm not talking about the physical kind of our main means of payment but about the kind of putty that children use to build strange figures and you get upset about the fact that it is apparently not possible to simply NOT mix the individual colors into a gray lump. Be that as it may, I didn't particularly like it and put the sample to one side, more than unimpressed. A few days later, when I actually wanted to spray Cuirtis, I apparently picked up the wrong sample and completely dipped into it. "Wow, Cuirtis is great but completely different to what I expected". When I put the little atomizer back, my eyes probably briefly resembled the little "we are going to Disneyland" girl in the back seat of the car (EVERYONE KNOWS).

It was CC. I was totally flashed. How could it be that I suddenly perceived the scent so positively? Sure, still a spicy opening, light pepper, a little nutmeg and sage, but at the same time I found myself in the most beautiful cloud of ambergris oud I've ever smelled. No cola, no marzipan, just oud and ambergris in an unprecedented abstinence of any association. The "sinking grade" oud from the Philippines, which basically means that the wood is so infected that the proportion of resin formed as a reaction is so high that it sinks in the water, is, according to Adam, the highest quality oud he has ever used and extracted for a fragrance. It is super prominent on my skin. Completely free of fermentation or animalic notes, it unfolds a wonderfully resinous, slightly mineral "blue" fragrance that complements the main player of this composition extremely well.

Now to the real star of this fragrance. Ambergris. Even in the world-famous novel "Moby Dick", Herman Melvill, in the lyrical guise of Captain Ahab, dedicates an entire chapter (92) to this mysterious and fascinating material in which he writes: "I forgot to say that some hard, round, bony plates were found in this ambergris, which Stubb at first thought might be the buttons of sailors' sweaters; but it afterwards turned out that they were nothing more than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in this way."
That now the imperishability of this most fragrant ambergris is found in the heart of such putrefaction - is that nothing? Remember the words of St. Paul in Corinthians about corruption and incorruption, that we are sown in dishonor but raised in glory. And remember also the saying of Paracelsus about what makes the best musk."

The ambergris still waxy in the whale's belly serves the sole purpose of preventing the sperm whale's digestive tract from being processed into shredded meat by razor-sharp squid beaks. Jaaaaaa... nature. The fact that this stuff now smells extremely appealing to some people probably doesn't matter to the marine mammal on which Moby Dick is based.

In the case of CC, however, white ambergris was used, which floats on the surface of the water for months or even decades and is thus dried out by the sun and "matures" into a stony-looking lump that loses any fecal aspects that are clearly noticeable in fresh ambergris.

Three different tinctures are used. 5%, 10% and Ambergris Resinoid, which is like a 100% concentrate. I contacted Adam about this and he explained that an extremely highly concentrated tincture is heated until all the liquid has evaporated and the result has a beeswax-like consistency.
Call me a windbag, but I maintain that you can get enough of the different concentrations. If you know a little about the raw material, you can clearly recognize countless facets of this diverse raw material. Nuances of tobacco, vanilla, caramel, various resins such as benzoin and incense accompanied by a fine mentholated freshness in combination with an incredibly beautiful, slightly mineral, balancing saltiness that is reminiscent of sun-dried skin on a Caribbean vacation.

The addition of sandalwood and ylang-ylang creates a creamy texture which, in my opinion, contrasts perfectly with the dry, resinous aspects of oud and ambergris. In the meantime, it even creates a very light sun cream character on my skin.
In his presentation video for Musk Collection, Adam says about CC: "I wanted the result to be quite minimalistic". This statement is true in the sense that the main focus of the fragrance is actually on just three ingredients. Amgergris, oud and sandalwood. However, a paradox arises from the incredible complexity that each of these raw materials contains within itself.

I have now spent a week really intensively with the fragrance and with every "wear" it gets even better for me. I can't predict whether the fragrance will continue to mature and to what extent it will change as a result, but even if it stays exactly as it is now, it's a 10/10 for me. Apart from "Rauque", there hasn't been a composition for a long time that has appealed to me as much as Creme de la Creme. I'm already looking for a back-up, even though I disliked it so much at first. This shows me once again that you should never make hasty judgments and that this insight, applied to all areas of life, is a credo that has a positive influence on many things in the long term. Thank you very much for reading.