Aqua Allegoria Harvest Mandarine Basilic Guerlain 2023

Do you know the feeling when you open a super juicy, perfect mandarin with your fingers? When the fresh juice flows over your hands and the bitter-sweet peel leaves orange-yellow traces under your thumbnails? When you can't stop sniffing the peel residue and the whole room air is saturated with the most wonderful sour bitter sweet mixture of the fruit's wonderful essential oils.

Yes, that's exactly what Mandarine Basilic Harvest smells like. The top note, immediately after spraying is the most realistic fresh mandarin I have ever smelled in a fragrance. I actually took a good look at all 3 of this line and have to say; this one is the most rounded in my opinion and for me the most beautiful. Here is a little comparison so that you can perhaps make a better decision:

If you find the MB Original a little too tart/basil-heavy and soapy, I would recommend the Harvest. With the OG, I sometimes had the feeling that I was breathing in bubble bath. In contrast to the OG, the citrus note in Harvest lingers right to the end. So the mandarin and the green notes fade away evenly together. In the OG, I found the green notes to be in the foreground quite soon.
The Harvest generally smells more photorealistic. Simply incredibly real and I have been longing for such a fragrance for a long time, as the essential oil of mandarin simply has such a mood-lifting effect and simply makes your mouth water.

The Forte is also very nice. But it goes more in the direction of an overripe or candied mandarin with much more syrupy depth. It's nicer if you don't smell it directly with your nose on your arm, as it's quite strong and sweet. In the drydown, you can barely smell a mandarin anymore. It's really sexy and beautiful, but very different in scent color from its 2 brothers. The 2 others offer the more realistic mandarin.

They are both fresh, yet the Harvest is a little warmer, more concentrated, closer to the skin, sweeter/bitter, smelling more like the wonderfully tangy peel, somehow more radiant and sunny than the original, which I find very cooling and more bounces off the skin and floats around your head. The OG has a more complex progression as it moves from tangerine juice to an extremely soapy, refreshing, but for me not quite right basil tea.

I clearly prefer Harvest with its simpler scent, as it captures the most beautiful tangerine in its original and unadulterated form, with lighter green and tea-like accents that never steal the show from the fruit.