ScentMagpie

This is a ylang lovers dream. It’s a smooth creamy ylang with the rubbery, medicinal aspects of ylang edited out and replaced with spices (mostly nutmeg) and some lovely vanilla and resins. All draped over a soft bed of genuine musk. It lasts for days on skin and on clothes and bedding for weeks. I’ve never tried the extrait but I feel like it’s misnamed. It should be Ylang Khabib.
Anyhow, I love this stuff. On me, it’s a really feminine, va-va-voom kind of floral oriental. One drop and I’m enveloped in a cloud of sophisticated sexiness that leaves a beautiful trail.
I kind of wrote this as a response to Greenfairie’s review and I want to say something about attar perfumes in general, because if you’re used to alcohol based fragrances, attars can be hard to parse. Generally the notes are more compressed and streamlined. Without the alcohol to disperse the scent, it’s just going to wear differently and it’s unfair to expect otherwise. I have quite a number of attars and I do enjoy them, though I sometimes think of them as the “health food” of my perfume collection. Musk Khabib is no one’s idea of health food. It’s a rare attar that gives a full perfume experience.

As expected from the notes, this opens up intensely animalic. Civet and I are not friends so this note is the one I pick up most strongly. Here though, it's tempered by everything else so even though I'm getting the pissy civet, it's soft and compelling. I've had this oil for a few months and I often find myself choosing it over all the other Mellifluence oils i have even though, objectively speaking, I couldn't really say what I like about it.
If I go with what I'm smelling, it's a short lived, zoo enclosure kind of smell and who wants to smell like that? But it's strangely comforting and compelling. Sometimes, when I think it's long gone, I'll step outside and get something almost khus like, that zingy, lung filling vetiver attar smell.
It's all very strange. It must be the deer musk, which I can't really "smell" that makes this so compelling.
One of my favorites from this house.

An oudy, animalic bomb that needs to be applied extremely sparingly (tip of the toothpick only). The Nagarmotha (Cypriol oil) is the star of the opening, adding a note of grimy machinery to the oud. So a black panther prowling around an old motorcycle garage. Then it moves on to a lot of that "band aid" facet oud can have, and plenty of barnyard, plus civet for good measure. So now the black panther is pissing on a cow shed. Fortunately this all fades within an hour and what's left is a pleasant, faint woody vetiver and civet. After all that hard charging beginning it's almost shocking how quickly it fades.

If I were to rank the Mellifluence frags I've tried from most feminine to most masculine, this would be the most masculine, the kind of thing insecure men like to describe as "for real men only."

Honestly, this one is very difficult for me to appreciate as an oud noob. It's like a collection of all the most challenging aspects of oud in one place and quite overwhelming in even teensy doses. I can't promise I'll come back to it but never say never.

This was the one of the sample set I was most afraid to try, imagining a pissy civet bomb. But it's probably the tamest fragrance of the bunch. Light, waxy and slightly medicinal but also sweetish and approachable. Close sniffing yields the promised civet but otherwise it's easy going and friendly. It seems to wear quite close and last only a few hours.

Weirdly, I was a bit disappointed it wasn't more challenging.

This is an absolute beast of an oud, a purring black panther of an oud sleeping deep in a pitch black oudy cavern.

It was a real struggle for me to appreciate this one. The first few times it felt like my nose was circling this giant, impenetrable, black lump of oud without finding a crack where I might actually smell something. I didn't like it at all. But again, I kept coming back, trying again, experimenting with different amounts and application techniques. With only a toothpick tip's worth, it becomes more approachable, more house cat than big cat.

It's very animalic on top of being very oudy. I have yet to smell anything floral or citrus in this one, but there is a sense of the vanilla, not as a foody element but as adding something a bit more friendly to the uncompromising darkness.

Sadly this one is already gone from the web store but I'm going to keep trying to befriend my sample vial.