4
Helpful Review
Still unoriginal, but better
Boadicea month is off to a rocky start. After smelling and writing statements for 18 products from the British luxury brand, we capped out at a 7.5/10, those scents being Energizer and Jubilee. This is for good reason: Boadicea's core line has a multitude of designer-inspired products (incl. Terre d'Hermes, Grey Vetiver, Hypnotic Poison, Noir de Noir, and others) and even the ones that don't have any clear inspiration are extremely simple in their execution. So where will the road take us today?
Boadicea's 2024 release 1907 has a very evident niche inspiration. The scent opens tropical fruity, sweet & somewhat fresh. The inspiration is from Stéphane Humbert Lucas' hero franchise God of Fire and differentiating the two in the air is very difficult (we'll later touch on why this is an issue for Boadicea). The interesting part about 1907 is the fact that mango (nor any other tropical fruity accord) is not listed and you can get a good vision for how Boadicea pulled off this fragrance when you compare the notes with the on-skin dry-down. On-skin, the scent smells a bit of sweetened lemon with light spices, somewhat comparable to how Kilian's recently launched Angels' Share on the Rocks was executed. But with the Boadicea, that spiciness appears to be driven by the listed floral notes, especially the violet. Given that this is my 19th Boadicea product in the last ~10 days, I can pick up on some of the other listed notes too. Notably, I can sense the aromatic-woody tones that sit alongside the violet in the base. In the final dry-down, 1907 predictably arrives at white musk, a typical base note for fruity scents like this.
While my analysis might indicate that there is a lot going on, the core DNA stays true to the profile of God of Fire to the point where all those other aspects are barely worth mentioning. This is speculation, but I feel like the goal here was to build God of Fire on a different base so as to elevate the performance of the profile. However, that goal doesn't really come to fruition: we get some mild performance improvements, capping longevity at around 6 hours. For sillage, I do get a stronger opening than the SHL and while it does subside, it subsides quite a bit slower than God of Fire. All-in-all, that puts 1907 in a very poor market position: no feasible profile differentiation and minimal performance improvement, yet the scent retails for €650/100ml, a price that more than triples the SHL's €215/50ml.
To conclude, 1907 might be a good dupe/inspired-by product, but nothing exists in a vacuum and the conditions around the scent make for an underwhelming overall package.
Boadicea's 2024 release 1907 has a very evident niche inspiration. The scent opens tropical fruity, sweet & somewhat fresh. The inspiration is from Stéphane Humbert Lucas' hero franchise God of Fire and differentiating the two in the air is very difficult (we'll later touch on why this is an issue for Boadicea). The interesting part about 1907 is the fact that mango (nor any other tropical fruity accord) is not listed and you can get a good vision for how Boadicea pulled off this fragrance when you compare the notes with the on-skin dry-down. On-skin, the scent smells a bit of sweetened lemon with light spices, somewhat comparable to how Kilian's recently launched Angels' Share on the Rocks was executed. But with the Boadicea, that spiciness appears to be driven by the listed floral notes, especially the violet. Given that this is my 19th Boadicea product in the last ~10 days, I can pick up on some of the other listed notes too. Notably, I can sense the aromatic-woody tones that sit alongside the violet in the base. In the final dry-down, 1907 predictably arrives at white musk, a typical base note for fruity scents like this.
While my analysis might indicate that there is a lot going on, the core DNA stays true to the profile of God of Fire to the point where all those other aspects are barely worth mentioning. This is speculation, but I feel like the goal here was to build God of Fire on a different base so as to elevate the performance of the profile. However, that goal doesn't really come to fruition: we get some mild performance improvements, capping longevity at around 6 hours. For sillage, I do get a stronger opening than the SHL and while it does subside, it subsides quite a bit slower than God of Fire. All-in-all, that puts 1907 in a very poor market position: no feasible profile differentiation and minimal performance improvement, yet the scent retails for €650/100ml, a price that more than triples the SHL's €215/50ml.
To conclude, 1907 might be a good dupe/inspired-by product, but nothing exists in a vacuum and the conditions around the scent make for an underwhelming overall package.