Aaron Terence Hughes - Great Niche Perfumer & Sample of His Autumn Release Coming Soon

So, as you all have seen my blog has been empty for a while since i last wrote about the break i took. I simply didn't have anything of interest to talk about until now, because i really want to tell as many people about Aaron as i possibly can. The reason being, i have not felt this excited in a while about a fragrance house.

I was recently discussing with a fellow fragrance enthusiast how we would like to get something with a strawberry note in it. I had recently found Aaron's YouTube channel and discovered he was actually first a perfumer then a reviewer. As i was checking out some of his fragrances that are brilliant for the price as he welcomes people in who maybe do not have as much money as others in to his niche level fragrances with his 10ml bottles going for between £15-£35 along with his 50ml bottles at roughly £80- £100 which is good for the quality that this man can create which i can tell is very good from just the 3 that i have tested.

While looking through them i found his "Hard Candy | Aaron Terence Hughes" in its newest form, the 2023 version which has strawberry in the mid which made me smile and suddenly i remembered that i had watched his review about this fragrance and what i remembered excited me a lot! You see, Aaron had planned on discontinuing his Hard Candy fragrance and had told everyone about it, but what happened next was something that really drew me in. His fans started to email him begging him not to discontinue it, and unlike so many big designer houses who would just ignore them and end it to be replaced with some subpar flanker, instead Aaron listened, and not only did he go in to his lab of which he has notes created especially for him he done something that shocked me. He upscaled the fragrance from an EDP to an Extrait De Parfum, gave it a new bottle and increased performance. He then went on to create an Elixir version so if you like a deeper kind of frgargance maybe check that out also. The 2 can be layered. However i am still not finished with the length Aaron went to please his fans! Not only did he do this with Hard Candy, but this set him on a path and he done it to all of his fragrances turning thm in to Extrait De Parfum! I have never heard of such a thing and instantly realised this was someone to take seriously and that i needed to buy some of his fragrances ASAP, which lead to me getting his 2023 version of Hard Candy. OMG i love it! I have not felt this invigorated since i was directed to the house of Lorenzo Pazzaglia who also creates Parfum De Extract concentration fragrances but as much as i love Lorenzo's fragrances none had made me as excited as i was when i wore Hard Candy for the first time last night! I just could not stop smelling myself!

I recently got my first 4 Xerjoff fragrances and even they didn't excite me as much as Hard Candy has, and thus moving Aaron's fragrances in to my first place priority list in front of Xerjoff, Roja, Lorenzo and any other fragrances i had been thinking about buying! EDIT: I just ordered his NEON 2023 and HAZE Extreme 2023!

I not only received Hard Candy but i got a sample of his Legend (2023) and another which is simply titled "Autumn Release" and woah! Legend is like a higher quality mix of Sauvage, Bleu De Chanel and Luna Rossa Carbon with his own twist to it. Autumn however has had me going through a chain of different events. Light musky, fruity scent where i thought it was very weak so sprayed more, boy what a mistake, this thing is an absolute beast! Think of the strong leather note in Bentley for Men Intense without the rum and that is where it leads after the musky fruity stage sweeping back and fore between the leather, fruit and musk. I would never have thought fruit and leather would work like this. It just does, leather enthusiasts will love this for sure! And as i finished writing this it is moving on to my favourite stage yet, oh i love this! I will let it be a secret and when it comes out i will write about it for you all, or maybe you will get a free sample also if you order from him before it is released =)

On the forums someone asked why any of us were excited about Autumn and i said i simply wasn't because here in Scotland and the rest of the UK from the end of summer last year we skipped Autumn and went straight in to a 9 month winter of hell, no spring this year and suddenly the other day temperatures like we had in December but now again in the middle of July. My answer was that i wanted Autumn as far away as possible lol. Now i really can't wait for it to find out what the real name of this "Autumn Release" sample is going to be called and to see what all the exact notes are.

If you have not seen Aaron's reviews they are great as you are getting them from the perspective of an actual perfumer, and i don't mean Jeremy Fragrance who reviews fragrances and has people create them for him. No Aaron has had notes made especially for hm with his Italian Bergamot and others. He uses natural Oud with other great notes from what i have seen so far and he as a perfumer is the one that creates them himself and he makes them so he can wear them also. So of course he is going to work hard on products he wants to wear on himslef. So this is just another plus for me.

Something else i just remembered worth mentioning is that he has created his fragrances in a way that they can all be layered one way or another with each other and i have seen people talking about doing this already mentioning great outcomes, so that is yet another bonus point added to this great perfumer. What more can you ask than what this man has done?

You can watch him here Main Youtube Channel and here is him talking about the upscaling and how he listened to his fans while talking about "Hard Candy | Aaron Terence Hughes" in this Hard Candy quick review video for just 1min 30sec.

I just found an in depth interview talking about his relaunch in a 13 minute video you can watch By Clicking HERE

When looking at reviews for his fragrances you must remember that some will be from a previous version of his fragrances so make sure you are getting information about the 2023 versions with all natural notes and Extrait De Parfum. He also has a Hard Candy Elixir you can hear him talk about here Hard Candy Elixir Video His videos are only roughly 2mins long when talking about his own fragrances. Please check him out as words can only be interpreted so far in the form of text, and it is hard to convey emotion like my sheer joy due to discovering this man's fragrances. So i urge you to try them yourself so you experience it on your own!

Thanks for reading. Mitch

, have a good SOTD 😀