Patchouli
Canadian fir balsam
Pine
Moroccan geranium
05/06/2025
Omnipotato
276 Reviews
Omnipotato
Helpful Review
10
Expensive, synthetic, unoriginal, unfashionable, bad performance — worst 2025 release so far
This stuff costs $185 retail. You know what else costs around that price? And I'm talking retail here. A bottle of Mancera, or Montale, or Frapin, or Orto Parisi. We're getting close to private line territory too. Armani's private line, i.e. Armani Privé - Thé Yulong costs $195 for 100ml. Heck, 50mls of Dior's private line, which is top of the line perfumery, only costs $30 more than this. And this fragrance is not going to get much cheaper at discounters; the old Y Le Parfum (2021) is still going for over $100 at discounters — you can get a Nishane at that price.
So let's throw all notion of "oh it's a department store designer, it's supposed to be low-quality and synthetic" out the window. If they want to give it premium pricing, I'll review it as a premium fragrance. And as a premium fragrance, this is absolutely god-awful. It's like paying $30 for a gourmet hamburger and then finding out the chef just went to Mcds and bought one for you.
Because at the end of the day, this is drugstore swill. It smells like one of those peel-and-sniff fragrance samples they used to have in magazines, where the weird plasticky scent of the page and glue would get mixed in with the fragrance.
The citrus in the opening is unbelievably synthetic. There's also a strange sweet fruity note that I can't really describe further, because it doesn't smell like a specific fruit, or realistic in any way. The "patchouli" and "pine" in here are just chemicals that don't really resemble those natural plants. Some spicy geraniol wraps things up, a hollow shell of the geranium flower, stripped of all character. It's like if they made a Gatorade flavor into a scent. What does "Glacier Freeze" taste like? A bunch of chemicals, just like how this fragrance smells.
And on top of the synthetic and low-quality nature of this fragrance, it even manages to be not just unoriginal, but unfashionable. This scent wouldn't have been out of place 10 or 15 years ago. I wouldn't recommend this fragrance to anyone under 30, and if you're above 30, it's going to smell like you haven't updated your fragrance since you were in high school. It sits in that hole where it is not vintage and cool like a fougere or chypre, and not cutting edge and modern like Sauvage Elixir or Pacific Chill.
And wouldn't you expect a chemical concoction like this to at least have good performance? Nope. Sits close to the skin after about an hour. The one purpose this could have been used for would be as a loud, brash clubbing fragrance (albeit for an aging Millennial), but it can't even do that. What an absolute disappointment, not that expectations were very high in the first place. I think the high point of this line was Y Eau Fraîche and it's been all downhill from there.
We're not even halfway through 2025 but this might be a good candidate for worst 2025 release.
Edit: this one stayed on my skin for like 10 hours as a skin scent (just a musk note), so I'll update my longevity rating. Still stand by what I said about the performance. Projection is very poor.
So let's throw all notion of "oh it's a department store designer, it's supposed to be low-quality and synthetic" out the window. If they want to give it premium pricing, I'll review it as a premium fragrance. And as a premium fragrance, this is absolutely god-awful. It's like paying $30 for a gourmet hamburger and then finding out the chef just went to Mcds and bought one for you.
Because at the end of the day, this is drugstore swill. It smells like one of those peel-and-sniff fragrance samples they used to have in magazines, where the weird plasticky scent of the page and glue would get mixed in with the fragrance.
The citrus in the opening is unbelievably synthetic. There's also a strange sweet fruity note that I can't really describe further, because it doesn't smell like a specific fruit, or realistic in any way. The "patchouli" and "pine" in here are just chemicals that don't really resemble those natural plants. Some spicy geraniol wraps things up, a hollow shell of the geranium flower, stripped of all character. It's like if they made a Gatorade flavor into a scent. What does "Glacier Freeze" taste like? A bunch of chemicals, just like how this fragrance smells.
And on top of the synthetic and low-quality nature of this fragrance, it even manages to be not just unoriginal, but unfashionable. This scent wouldn't have been out of place 10 or 15 years ago. I wouldn't recommend this fragrance to anyone under 30, and if you're above 30, it's going to smell like you haven't updated your fragrance since you were in high school. It sits in that hole where it is not vintage and cool like a fougere or chypre, and not cutting edge and modern like Sauvage Elixir or Pacific Chill.
And wouldn't you expect a chemical concoction like this to at least have good performance? Nope. Sits close to the skin after about an hour. The one purpose this could have been used for would be as a loud, brash clubbing fragrance (albeit for an aging Millennial), but it can't even do that. What an absolute disappointment, not that expectations were very high in the first place. I think the high point of this line was Y Eau Fraîche and it's been all downhill from there.
We're not even halfway through 2025 but this might be a good candidate for worst 2025 release.
Edit: this one stayed on my skin for like 10 hours as a skin scent (just a musk note), so I'll update my longevity rating. Still stand by what I said about the performance. Projection is very poor.
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