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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I'm somewhat of a freshie hater. The appeal of these often fleeting scents is lost on me, and if I simply want to "smell clean", showering and doing laundry typically suffice. Citrus-heavy fragrances are often an olfactory assault to my nose: Nishane's...

Potent citrus-iris-moss composition, so bright and sharp that you can almost hear it squeak. L'Attesa has a lot going for it. The prominence of the iris. The strength of its fizzy first impression. The cool, detached, angular, slightly...

I initially wrote this one off – "Why would I want to smell like straight-up honey?" – relegating it to the hyper-realistic gourmand category of fragrance that usually meets with my disapproval. Then, a few days following my initial...

To my nose, Coromandel is a linear, damp patchouli with a well-calibrated dose of sweetness. The fragrance has a translucent and one-dimensional feel that leads me to crave more density and substance. Perhaps it's this diaphanous quality that others...

I was fully prepared to dismiss Sintra—surely it would be too girly, too saccharine, too juvenile. And while it does indeed exhibit some of those characteristics, it's also incredibly well executed. Sintra is often compared to Kilian's...