Crystal Flowers Montale

Montale makes excellent Middle Eastern-inspired perfumes. Most anything with the word 'aoud' in the name is going to be a worthy representative of the ever-growing class of aoud perfumes. Once one steps out of the aoud range, however, everything is up for grabs, and it's anyone's guess what the perfume may be like!

CRYSTAL FLOWERS is a good example of a Montale which might have been a mainstream designer launch. It smells fine to me, a perfectly wearable office-ready, inoffensive fruity-floral frag. The flowers are abstract but not to the point of being unwearable. This composition reminds me of perfumes such as Creed SPRING FLOWER or Bond no 9 CHELSEA FLOWERS, both of which, too, fit into the category of office-ready inoffensive fruity floral frags. This really is a genre by now, and when I say fruity-floral, I mean more abstract floral than fruity, but there is a touch of fruity to give the overall composition a brightness. The musk used, too, is clear and clean, not dark and sweaty. This is a twenty-first-century type of perfume which has gained a legion of followers in the last few years. In some ways it may seem superficial, but it is also likable to many consumers.

Precisely because this sort of perfume is the sort of thing one runs into at Sephora among the current bestsellers, it may not be the wisest investment of one's big Montale bucks. Try before you buy.