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Systemshaak
1
A Rose for the Rest of Us
I distinctly remember the only time I got to visit the hippie-adjacent store in my town when I was a kid - they had a whole lineup of essential oils to try out, and I wound up fixated on rose. Like, to the point where my mother reluctantly bought a bottle of it for me (hey, support your local business after all) and I'd just open it up and sniff it from time to time to relax myself a bit. Of course, being a child, I didn't know how this all worked, so at some point I dumped it on top of a bowl of old potpourri, thinking it would make my room smell good forever. Yeah, that was the end of smelling a rose oil for me. Whoops.
Flash forward past most of my life wearing either no fragrances or a citrus-woody one from time to time, and I got to thinking about that time - I always get pulled back into scent as a hobby, but as a guy without the skin or the style to pull off a traditionally-feminine scent, I wished there had been a more masculine rose scent out there. When I smelled rose in most unisex or women's perfumes, it came with other notes or synthetics that pushed me off of it - notes you'd probably find in women's hairspray or deodorant. Scents do not have a gender, yes, but that chemical profile just didn't do it for me. Was it the rose that did it? Well, after trying out Duke, now my answer is no: rose is for everyone, it's all in how you present it.
Because Disney World's EPCOT center is surprisingly packed with international perfume shops, I recently got to try out the greatest hits of the Penhaligon's lineup. Like with most fragrance lineups (and sadly, like just about all of the Guerlain lineup I also surveyed), a ton of those weren't for me. Ambrox and I aren't friends, I'm not much for rum, nor do I work well with most synthetic or natural substitutes for leather. Blenheim Bouquet was neat, but a little fleeting. But The Duke stood out: there was something about the deep florals interacting with some drink-like bitters and a looming, dry darkness in it that worked for me.
Duke had a multiphase drydown: at first spray, and for the first hour, you do pick up both the gin notes ("botanical" I suppose) and a light floral thing, like an old-school barbershop with a luxury shaving cream. And that's nice. As someone who can no longer drink alcohol, I miss complex drinks made with gin and bitters and herbs and stuff! Then the top notes, as they do, fade out, the spices set in, and you wind up with a slightly woody spiced rose hybrid. This is why I mentioned my experiences with rose above: this was finally an expression of rose that didn't have a lot of the traditional-feminine chemistry baggage to it. It wasn't overly sweet or rounded, but it also wasn't "dried rose" either. It's more like the best parts of a rose scent with an added dry, crunchy darkness to it. Then the long tail is just an exquisite rose fragrance - no bells and whistles, just a good rose. One that even my wife was into as a scent I could wear - and that's not easy to find.
Walking out of that store, my wallet was light and my spirits were high; this is a good one for me in particular and for all the rose-loving dudes out there.
And that bottle! Who doesn't love a pup?
[A couple of things to note here: one, don't worry about the cumin note. I bet this is how they balanced out the rose to darken and dry it, but as someone who cooks with cumin seeds all the time, it's not the same thing. This isn't "hints of BO" cumin, but maybe your skin might vary on this. Two, it's hilarious that after I fell in love with this scent, there it was in the notes - vetiver yet again. Somehow, even if I can't smell vetiver, the scents I love all have it somewhere, whether that's an actual extract or just vetiveryl acetate. It's not a vetiver scent, but there it is.]
Top Notes 
Cumin
Pink pepper
Heart Notes 
Gin
Rose
Base Notes 
Cedarwood
Vetiver
Kurai
Ninamariah
Estbienla
Q8baggio
FreshKatsu
