Chocola Addict French Avenue 2025

This arrived yesterday and I tested it on a blotter.

It smells like rancid crotch sweat dusted with cocoa powder. It's incredibly strong and lasts for well over 12 hours. Probably the worst thing I've ever smelled coming out of a perfume bottle.

I was hoping for leathery orange chocolate. I am hoping that this will macerate into something nice over the next few months, and maybe in January I can psyche myself up to try spraying it again.

This is nothing like Chocolate Greedy by Montalle.
----------- EDIT -----------

It's just shy of 30 days since I posted this review originally.

I had to go into my storage boxes to grab some documents earlier, and as I keep my macerating and off season scents in there too and was feeling somewhat masochistic, I gave this a spray.

Quelle surprise, it improved. It catches me by surprise every time, but with how bad this one was, I had basically all but written it off, so the amount of change Chocola Addict has gone through over this last month is truly astounding.

Spraying this in the air, you get a thin veil of naturally sweet cocoa powder and a heavy, thick and yet surprisingly pleasant bitterness.

On skin this opens with that same cocoa powder, but the bitterness is more legible now and reads as leather and bitter, smoky resins.

After it settles on the skin for a few minutes, a sweet orange note becomes apparent, softening the inhale as it leads to the bitter leathery resin of the body of the perfume, it's juicy and a little zesty.

Close to the skin you get the juice and bitter leathery resin, and the wider scent bubble smells of the darkest chocolate you can imagine, accented with just a little sweet orange zest.

That sweaty and unwashed smell is still just ever so slightly there amongst the heart notes, but in this concentration it's tolerable and contributing an old school animalic like quality to the overall scent. Not sure if this facet will dissappear with further ageing, but as it is, I don't actually dislike it.
3 sprays (back of hands and chest) for a subtle, low intensity sillage that reaches arms length. Spraying more brings out more tangerine but the cocoa powder is less noticable.

5 hours or so longevity.

Unisex if you like vintage perfumes, but leans masculine if you're unfamiliar.

I just tried layering a few other scents with this, on the back of one hand I've got Eternal Oud by Lattafa, and on the other Suki by Weir - and both are smelling fantastic. The fruity sweetness in both really adds to the bitter leather here.

Lattafa is slowly fading away for me, so I am now intensively exploring French Avenue, Paris Corner, and Co.

Among other things, also Chocola Addict....the packaging is just as high-quality as with all Arabic suppliers.
The bottle is also high-quality, and the sprayer is top-notch.

The scent....at first, a realistic dark chocolate note comes through.
However, this fades a bit afterwards....I don't perceive any mandarin, but rather a bitter tamarind chutney note.
Then it becomes slightly resinous with a subtle vanilla undertone.
Sillage and longevity are fine, and the price-performance ratio is excellent.
All in all, it's something completely different, and I am super happy with my latest French Avenue purchases.

If you're expecting a chocolate-vanilla gourmand with a hint of incense and myrrh, you don't need to buy this one. The resins clearly dominate here.

The opening is quite comparable to Soft Cake Orange, but after about 15 seconds, Soft Cake is already gone. The orange note fades away, and I don't perceive it anymore as the fragrance develops.

The sillage: The fragrance notes are very harmonious. For a while, I perceive a lovely blend of chocolate, leather, and incense. The chocolate is sweet and not necessarily bittersweet. I can smell the leather, but it blends so well with the chocolate that it comes across as quite subtle. The incense reveals both its sweet, soft, and spicy side, as well as its very resinous, slightly green, fir or pine-like aspect.
It may not sound like it fits, but to me, it really smells wonderful.
As it progresses, the resinous aspect of the incense becomes louder, the leather disappears, and the further it goes towards the drydown, the more the chocolate fades away.

The drydown is very resinous, slightly bitter (also resinous-lemony), and I also perceive a warm, sweet, creamy vanilla.
In the sillage, this combination of resin and vanilla is very pleasant, but on my skin, the fragrance notes are different.
Maybe it will be different on your skin, but on me, the fragrance notes are rather "raw," meaning coarser, rougher, and more angular. And I only perceive the resins and leather there.

I think you really have to be into incense, myrrh - into this resinous aspect.

I really like this combination and the fragrance a lot!