Quailist

Contrary to the claims of some other reviewers, I didn't find Fleurs d'Oranger to be much of a powerhouse at all. It opens with a flourish and struts around for about an hour—promising!—but from there things rapidly go downhill. By hour three, it's already fully in its death throes, at which point it tosses around a bit of nutmeg in a desperate bid to remain relevant. By hour four, the scent is almost completely undetectable. At no stage of this all-too-short journey do any rough edges or animalic elements make themselves known.

Fleurs d'Oranger is a beautiful scent, but also one that feels watered down and artificially restrained—at least in the iteration that I sampled.

Intriguing and multifaceted patchouli scent with a masculine-leaning secondhand bookshop vibe. The opening is out-of-this-world potent, bordering on overwhelming, but it quickly calms down to something more elegant.

However, it calms down a bit too much for my tastes: I initially wrote a Statement on Horizon that I had to delete because I falsely accused it of having poor longevity. After around three hours I could only kinda-sorta detect it on my sweater. However, I ended up smelling it on my skin—rather prominently in fact—when I went to bed 12 hours after application. So I've changed my assessment to excellent longevity, rubbish sillage.

With that said, Horizon is still a cracking perfume, from a purely scent perspective. It's along the same lines as Coromandel, but with more to chew on. If earthy, gourmand-adjacent patchoulis are your thing, you should definitely give it a whirl—perhaps you'll have better luck with the performance.

High femme and ultra clean, Honour has a creamy-soapy feel with a slight herbaceous kick. There are no rough edges on this one: it's completely skank-free with nary an indole in sight.

Unlike other commenters, I didn't find Honour to be overly loud. Rather, it was more on the capricious side, sometimes fully retreating into the background and at other times re-appearing with full force. In terms of development, I found it mostly linear for its lifespan of 8.5+ hours.

While I can't find much fault with this long-lasting, nicely done white floral, for me it lacks that certain je ne sais quoi.

Although I was smitten with Epic on the test strip, wearing it makes me feel like I nakedly rolled around in the spice section at the Grand Bazaar. I appreciate cumin in scents like Jungle Elephant and L'Air du Desert Marocain, but the overdose level contained in Epic is simply grating and unbalanced. I was relieved when I went to bed, finally ending my lengthy and unintentional trip to the spice market.

Epic's solid 8+ rating surprises me somewhat—probably a selection effect due to the preponderance of "challenging fragrance" fans who congregate on a site like this one.

I was initially jazzed about this—it's not every day that you experience a candied yuzu barbershop scent—but in the drydown it developed that sweet rubbery hospital smell that underpins the hideous Baccarat Rouge 540.

Unfortunately for me, the performance of Moonlight in Chiangmai was above average: I still reeked of a dentist's office from hell at bedtime six hours after application. A lamentable fate for what started off as an energizing and original fragrance.