A feeling I wanted to experience again and again.
A wow moment that I wanted to get hold of again and again.
A sensory impression that was irretrievably there when I started my new perfume life in 2016 and bought a sample of the one and only Herod on a local niche perfume sales website along with a few other samples. I happily tested them all one by one and some I liked, some I didn't. I didn't have any test strips so I tested everything on my skin and, as is sometimes the case, some impressions fade quite quickly or fade from memory. But I kept coming back to the one sample later and just couldn't get enough of it. Like when you're standing on a steep slope and you know that the abyss is waiting in front of you, but something inside you urges you to take a step closer. It was also the first scent I ever sprayed on the back of my hand before going to sleep to be carried away even more gently into dreamland.
HEROD.
Against a reddish sepia backdrop, I climbed cloud-outlined castles in the dream worlds, built by God in his heavenly kingdom and bathed in a cloak of dark gold by a blood-red, setting sun. Everywhere, juicy cherries hung from the trees and the lords of the house smoked cigars rolled in silky tobacco leaves with me, spreading a wonderfully hallucinogenic smoke throughout the castle of the gods.
I woke up and my bed was the resting place of a newly ushered in age of my life, as many other perfumos on this platform may know it. There is life before and after the ringing in of our boundless perfume passion. We are not just anyone. We are people who look behind the curtain and realize that there is so much more to the hustle and bustle of people in this world and we breathe it in with our fine noses and deal with it day in and day out. It is as if we have been given a new eye with which we can smell better.
So I didn't smell much with my amateur nose, apart from a smoky, slightly cherry-like, invisibly cinnamon-y mist that reached my nose.
Now I know it was the Herod effect.
It's the Iso-E-Super, together with a light cherry tobacco, which, in combination with the cistus, creates an incomparable, molecule-like mix that I have never smelled again in another fragrance. Except for
Dates Delight.
This black and gold fused planet bottle transports me back to a bygone era. It gives me back a piece of Herod. All the while, the exact same veil of fragrance rises from the back of my hand to my nose that I smelled in 2016 when I held a jewel in my hand, completely inexperienced, that will remain irretrievably in the past like the echo of a long-faded cry in an abandoned house.
Herod will never exist like this again, I thought.
And yet Dates Delight gives me that feeling back.
It's as if the coumarin-coated, glassy, sticky cloak of the sweet date takes over from the iso-e-super and the cinnamony cherries, and the peony in combination with the benzoin replicates the very scent that will never be able to sit on my shelf like this again, precisely because it was reformulated in a broken way and was never really long-lasting and radiant anyway.
Unfortunately, Dates Delight is no different.
With a little more longevity and just as restrained as the shadow of the heroic horse on the horizon, it remains a revived sensation.
A very nice feeling, a scent that seems unique and inimitable.
A scent that was perhaps created by chance in the perfume laboratory when great ingredients were tipped together and is tantamount to a grandiose creation.
The most beautiful top note ever created.
HEROD and DATES DELIGHT.
PS with surprise that no one before me had thought of this comparison.
Top Notes 
Date
Peony
Heart Notes 
Tonka bean
Caramel
Cinnamon
Coumarin
Base Notes 
Honey
Labdanum
Sugar powder
Benzoin
Indonesian oud
Tottilinho01
Faka
EliasSaddiq
NicheOnly
