ClaireV
1
No relation to Gris Charnel
Musamam White Intense is baffling. I bought it because all the descriptions I could fine online were for a creamy but fresh coconut-sandalwood scent. The only lactones I love are the ones that exist in nature, i.e., milky notes wrenched from peach skin, fig leaf sap, or sandalwood, rather than from an off-the-shelf aromachemical labelled ‘milk’ or ‘gelato’, so the naturally blond-on-blond idea of Musamam White Intense appealed greatly to me. But smelled blind, I would have pegged this more as the lime peel and rubbery, peachy undertones common to some frangipani materials, over a tart, pale lumberyard-ish wood that might be sandalwood but that could also be hinoki or oak, given its vague, slightly featureless woodiness (I guess I was right about the blond). While it’s true, technically, that there is a tiny bit of milkiness and a nuance one might conceivably define as coconutty if you squint hard enough, the character of this scent is mostly sour, silvery woods washed in a mineral stream with citrus rind. There is a tart pineapple not in there somewhere, too.
Despite the gap between expectation and reality, I quite like Musamam White Intense and wear it the most out of all my recent acquisitions. Or, maybe it’s not so much that I like it but that I have yet to figure out what it smells like to me. It continuously evades my grasp, which frustrates me. It might be the rare case of a Lattafa that is abstract and therefore complex, or it might be that what this scent is going for is something like the scent of driftwood on a winter’s beach, in which case it nails the brief. Spun as a citrusy, woody ‘ambergris’ beachcomber scent, I get it. I can see that. Try to sell me Musamam White Intense as a creamy-milky-coconut thing, though, and I start to believe that most of the people reviewing it are either full of it or are aping the review below them out of fear that what they are smelling must be ‘wrong’.
Top Notes 
Spices
Bergamot
Orange
Heart Notes 
Ambroxan
Coconut
Ylang-ylang
Base Notes 
Sandalwood
Benzoin
Tetyana
BriFeiler
Liberrita
Eaudenothing
