FvSpee

Anyone who traded lemons made a bad deal. The origin of the idiom is unknown, but it is conspicuous that it only occurs in perfection. "This afternoon I'm dealing with lemons" doesn't make any sense, because the fact that you've been trading lemons is always only recognizable in retrospect, and then you use the past tense and make a lemony face. And says, the thing apologetic to itself, where we are right now at the German saying wisdoms: "When the gentlemen of Town Hall come, they'll be smarter than before".

I've been so sick of this citric smell here. One or two years ago I sneaked around in the KaDeWe around the light citric Goutals, which I had somehow eaten a fool at that time: Eau du Sud, Eau de Monsieur and Eau d'Hadrien samit the whole big Hadrian family. I then decided on the "Monsieur", but apparently without a long-term test. That must've been the big mistake. For immediately after spraying on, "Eau de Monsieur" is wonderful, a sparkling citric firework, after 5 minutes still apart, and after 30 to 60 minutes, even after a diesel injection with 8-10 full sprays, I only feel a breath that can be described as "nice" in content, but definitely not exciting, and that only when I press the nose on the sprayed arm. After 2 hours: Nothing. Nothing. Nihil. Niente. Nada. Rien du tout. Let us speak the bitter truth: EdM is a very bad head note blender. And unlike Azzaro pour homme, where I had to have this disappointing experience, EdM didn't need a degenerative course of x reformulations. He was already born a head note blender.

I take note that others see it differently, 7 durability points from FabianO and 7.5 from Landlord are an authority argument that I take seriously, but that's the way it is with me. Here I am, I can't help it. Tested at least 5 times. I also tested other fragrances in between to check whether I have an anosmic phase (if not, I tried a few days ago a fragrance that was often described here as very volatile, which kept with me all day). And Mrs. von Spee, who has a much, much finer nose than I do, said 90 minutes after spraying on, with her nose directly on my skin: "Beautiful, but you hardly smell anything". A perfume, to which I sent a set of five fragrances for blind testing, placed it on 5th place and noticed that it seemed a bit one-dimensional and of little value.

I'm not talking myself into it anymore, the "Herrenwasser", but I admit I screwed up. If I'd rather have bought one of the not quite so pale Goutals for the money, like "Encens Flamboyant". I'm going to tip a "men's blanket" on my stupidity! Or a Tequila, of course with Zitroooone!

Addendum: Just browsed on the Annick-Goutal-Homepage. "Eau de Monsieur" is no longer in the program. Well, I'll at least have a vintage sweetheart in my closet. Maybe it's worth something. I'll drink the booze anyway!

For me, "Dior Homme" is one of the great classics; a striking, original and well-balanced composed fragrance, strong in development (and "strong" at all), immediately recognizable, a time shaping, a whole number of years lasting fragrance. I like him.

His name's funny, isn't it? To not give this fragrance, which is located in the border area of men's fragrances, a sweet, heavy, flowery, gourmand, warm name like "Kuschelwuschel" in a certain way, but to give it the most classic, imaginable men's fragrance name "Homme" in a dry and laconic way, already shows a sense of humour (or chutzpah or both).

For me "Homme" has two inseparably connected faces or figures, which cannot be clearly separated according to phases, but are constantly present in the fragrance as a whole, sometimes more one, sometimes more the other, and also depending on where you focus your fragrance perception, and which I don't want to assign to individual ingredient groups (I think the totality of the ingredients is responsible for both faces)

The one figure of the fragrance is the very metrosexual, even feminine: sweet, flowery, soft, intense (the obtrusive scarring) chords that, despite a tendency to heaviness, ultimately appear so transparent, floating and flowing that they evoke in me the thought of light silk garments, even gauze (which doesn't seem to be typically "masculine").

The other shape, for which perhaps beside the leather and the vetiver also iris and cocoa (because pure cocoa, not the Nesquick- & Co - powder consisting mainly of sugar is by far rather bitter than sweet) are responsible, is tart, bitter and serious (at the border to severity) - and with it also in the common understanding "male". I could imagine that this note (or the interplay of the two) also has a very attractive effect on the opposite sex (and not only on women who are looking for a loving and gentle protector and breadwinner).

If we take a closer look at the chronological course and the three classical notes, then the top note of bergamot, sage and lavender is not, in my opinion, independently formed. Not even for half a minute, actually not at all, can a somehow independent citric lavender spice freshness be detected. The notes are there, but from the beginning only as a very delicate accessory at the edge of the main event.

It is precisely this main event, which lasts for several hours, that in my perception is constituted by the powerful and very exciting, back and forth swaying interplay of the two faces (or poles) mentioned above, whereby the first half hour or hour of the "feminine", rather sweet and flowing aspect is more strongly accentuated and is followed by the bitterly harsh, strict counterattack. After several interactions and accent changes, after about six hours a quite quiet and rather linear-stable basis appears on the scene, which I would describe as subtly sweet, but at the same time surprisingly fresh and stimulating (wherever that may come from).

The shelf life and the sillage of "Homme" are good. The bottle has a very good and fine spray system. Opinions may differ as to whether his appearance is visually pleasing. What they can't separate about is that the designer should write the sentence "form follows function" 1,000 times on the blackboard. Whenever you take it (the bottle, not the designer) in your hand and want to spray it with it, the corners and edges cut you unpleasantly and you can't get a clean grip on the thing.

"Dior Homme" is not one of my absolute favourites, but I think it is a great fragrance and, as already mentioned, a great classic. I don't know if you'll love him, but if you're interested in perfume and you're a man (and if you're not) you should have tested him at least once.

What's clear is I like singular oud. He again bears the signature of his creator: Unexpected, unusual and special, but perfectly balanced, unagitated and sovereign. Vitality and noblesse. Lacy and resting in peace.

To describe the fragrance with words, to get an idea of it beforehand, to locate it on the sensual, mental and spiritual map, that is the much more difficult task for me. There is little analytic (individual scents, clear adjectives) or pictorial (metaphors, memories) that is urgently pushed into my pen.

That's a dark scent, sometimes a very dark one. There is the darkness of dark wood and the darkness of a dense, vast, immeasurable forest: mostly a boreal coniferous forest, but sometimes also a jungle. But this fragrance is just as unthreatening as it would be to cosy and homey.

That's an enormous, almost excessive woody scent! Sometimes smooth polished wood with a very fine polish, sometimes lively creaky wood from the trunk, from which fresh, sticky resin still emerges. But there's nothing stinging about it, there's nothing excessively hard about it, which normally pushes me back at very woody scents.

It's a very, very fresh fragrance, but what freshness is it, how can I put this? Now she reminds of mint, soon of fir oil, then of ambergris, and finally of fresh, ozone-rich cool air after the rain.

Is Singular Oud a fruity fragrance? Once you want to say (I would definitely not have felt the fig without help, but there is certainly something fruity) "what else?", and then you find this label completely absurd. And can the scent be called "sweet"? Most of the time I would say: "by no means!", but sometimes you can feel a gentle sweetness flowing out of him, of which you think she is the real core and magic of this fragrance, how can you deny the?

I feel saffron very, very clearly (which I like), but still I don't feel the note to be overdosed. It seems rather as if it must be absolutely compelling - and exactly in this strength - exactly there. Does the singular oud somehow make a gourmand? Not at all. I didn't feel incense at all during the first test, it's there at the third one, reserved but clear.

Does this fragrance have a strong development, or is it linear? To the eagle with it, I don't know myself! Maybe he can do magic too, that scent. Sometimes the clouds that rise from the neck smell quite different from those from the wrist. There is something humorous and mystical about him, as if Gandalf had brought him to the Shire for pleasure. I translate the "singular" from the name with "peculiar, strange", because that can also mean "singular".

Attempt at a conclusion: A wood scent. A fresh, rich, strong, deep dark, luminous, very vegetable, seriously sweet and calmly spicy wood scent, which is powerful and well visible and yet refuses any labelling. And again, as in the beginning: a good, strong and beautiful, a moderate, a human scent.

P.S. 1: At the first two tests "Singular Oud" seemed to me to be hardly durable. At the third attempt I can report a persistence of quite six hours (very close at any rate).

P.S. 2: By the way, my first thought at the first test was: Leather. That's not true. There's no one on it, and I don't think there is. The woody-vegetable dark spice is not far away from a leather aroma. But perhaps the association with me also came from the fact that "Singular Oud" intuitively reminded me of "Tuscan Leather". The two are certainly not twins, but a certain kinship already exists. Both fragrances contain woods, incense and saffron; the fruit aroma is introduced in TL by the raspberry, in "Singular Oud" by the green fig, which reminds other commentators here of raspberry! I was almost tempted to write pointedly: Just as "Vild" is a TL without wood, "Singular Oud" is one without leather (although both are better than TL, which I'm not a fan of). But with this aggravation I would have done Singular Oud wrong, it is much too independent for that, according to the notes used (patchouli, musk), but also according to the overall character.

I've liked figs for 20 years - for eating. Both the dried fruit and the beautiful fleshy fresh fruit. I remember my first fresh fig, I picked it from a wild fig tree in Croatia in the 90s, as a culinary awakening experience.

So although I have a positive basic attitude towards figs, my olfactory path to becoming a fig friend was rocky (though always upwards). Not counting any short tests of other fragrances that I hadn't memorized, it all started with "Premier Figuier" by "L'Artisan Parfumeur", a fragrance I had the highest expectations of, which were terribly disappointed. I found the scent gruesome and smelled almost only cheap coconut milk lemonade from the Asian snack bar. Then I tried "Feige" from the house of "Harry Lehmann", which I greatly appreciated, and was again very disappointed. Somehow too soft, musty, sweetish. I liked "Fico di Amalfi" from "Acqua di Parma" much better, and "Jardins de Kérylos" from "Parfumerie Générale" really good. But Diptyque has now shot down the fig with this product here, with the fig friend.

The fragrance has been described here many times, perhaps most beautifully and aptly from my point of view by Gaukeleya, and whether I can add anything substantial to it, I do not know.

Especially at the beginning, "Philosykos" spreads enormously cheerful, almost sparkling green notes (Frau von Spee in the blind test immediately associated "grass"), but in the end, for me it is a light blue, light, very free, wide scent. The fig fruit and its Mediterranean environment is wonderfully captured olfactorically - the coconut note, which disturbed me so terribly in "Premier Figuier" and which is also contained here according to the fragrance pyramid, is hardly noticeable to me, at most as a fine rounding off. If the fig is the focus of a fragrance, then a certain fruity sweetness can hardly be missing, but this one doesn't come across as mushy, but discreet and with an almost noble dryness, as if a touch of icing sugar is blowing through the sunny air.

Looking at the critical reviews here, the main criticisms seem to be that the fragrance is a bit one-dimensional and underdeveloped, and that it's too feminine for a unisex scent. I cannot agree with the first point for two reasons: Firstly, I don't find "Philosykos" to be at all unrefined and linear, and secondly I don't have any problems with soliflores, whose scent is as straight as a motorway in Italy - as long as it's beautiful. As for the second point of criticism, yes, I too find the fragrance rather (!) feminine, but not in such a way that a man could not use it with pleasure. Philoyskos is really not "unmanly"! And anyway: a real guy, or an average man in a masculine or classic men's wardrobe, with a fruity or flowery scent is perhaps especially interesting!

The shelf life is about 6 hours for me, very close to the skin maybe 9, and the sillage is restrained after the starting phase, but not annoyingly low. In itself quite a friend of long shelf life, I find it exactly fitting in this case. If necessary, you can add more at 14 o'clock, then the fragrance lasts the whole day

I was wondering if the fact that every time I tested a fig scent I found it better than the one I had tried before might simply indicate that I am getting used to fig as a scent. It may be that there is something to it, but nevertheless I believe that "Philosykos" is an unusually well-done scent. Its obvious commercial success speaks for itself: Although "Diptyque" isn't exactly mainstream right now (as I discovered the label, I described it in episode 4 of the Berliner Duftspazieränge, which I blogged about here a few days ago), it has 169 owners here at Parfumo and is listed on many wish and watch lists, and it was the starting point for several flankers at the manufacturer, from Philosykos EdP to the solid perfume to the special edition and, and, and, and...

My personal conclusion: 9 points (because who knows, maybe the upward path will continue and I will discover a still more beautiful fig scent, I need room to move up) and wish list.