ScentNebula

I can’t make up my mind how I feel about this one. When I first smelled it, I gasped because something about it is really impressive and beautiful…but at the same time, I found myself repulsed as I realised it smelled exactly like maple syrup and bacon - a delicious breakfast combo but not something I want to wear on my body.

I’m guessing the maple syrup note I’m detecting is from the rum and oak barrels. Aside from that, what I get (on both paper and skin) is allll smoke with a hint of soapy floral. I don’t get any leather or herbs or spices; and it’s only woody insofar as the wood is burning. It’s quite an odd combination because it smells like someone freshly showered and wearing a pretty, feminine floral perfume standing besides a roaring bonfire. Yet it somehow works. In the drydown, the vanilla-woodiness comes out more and the smoke is turned down a bit.

Although it’s a beautiful composition, this just doesn’t feel like “me”. It’s too sweet and reminiscent of breakfast and I keep alternating between thinking it smells nice and being vaguely nauseated. I think this confirms for me that rum is a note I should avoid. I never have good luck with rum fragrances (apart from Zoologist Rhinoceros, which is in a class of its own). For what it’s worth, this one is a LOT sweeter and stickier and smokier than Rhino, less herbal and fresh.

This fragrance is fairly strong for the first hour, but not as strong as I expected it to be (which is a good thing). 6 hours later, I’m still getting very faint whiffs of it when I move, but it’s mostly a skin scent.

I’m starting to notice an annoying pattern: about 9 out of 10 times when I sniff a supposed “leather” perfume, I can’t smell any leather at all.

I thought this was supposed to be a cowboy perfume, but all I get is a rich, intensely scented yellow flower with a fresh, green, stemmy quality and a strong indolic honey-pollen that takes on a decidedly urinous quality in the drydown. At least we can all agree this one smells like piss.
I also don’t get any tonka bean and if there’s cumin, it’s very in the background.

You know when you get a fresh haul of perfume samples in the mail, and there’s one note that the whole package smells like when you open it? Well, in this case, it was unfortunately the urine note from Untameable. At first I wondered if someone’s cat had peed on the parcel.
To top things off, somehow while taking the cap off later on, I managed to partially unscrew the lid and spill it all over my fingers. Of all the samples I got this is surely the worse one to have an accident like that with. It took some effort to scrub the smell of my fingers and I think the outside of the bottle is permanently imbued with the scent. It's been several days and I still keep getting whiffs of it throughout the house. It's that potent. However, this repeated exposure to the more challenging aspects of the scent have made me realise how much I love it.

To me, in the opening it smells like walking past an intensely scented exotic flowering plant in the botanical gardens, probably something with waxy white or yellow flowers, and getting a noseful of that almost fecal nectar scent that some flowers have, and there’s fallen, decaying flowers all over the ground as well, getting crushed under your feet as you walk. It’s very photorealistic to that experience in my opinion, and it has a fresh airiness from the florals alongside the darker stinkier notes.
Then in the drydown, as the urine note comes out more along with a kind of creamy floral, it starts to remind me of moonlit, humid summer nights, walking through cobblestone alleys reeking of urine, past indolic creeping jasmines that drape themselves over the trellises in people’s back gardens. It reminds me of the thick, electric energy in the calm before a summer storm, the feeling of tension, danger and excitement.

I have not spent much time around horses, so I can’t really comment on the accuracy of a horsey scent here. All I can say is it’s mostly floral on me, and quite a sweet floral at that (but sweet in a natural honey/nectar way, not a foody way).

This scent is difficult to wear and SO strong and lingering. Unfortunately, the immense projection and longevity is too much for me. It’s inescapable, exhausting. There’s also the fact that I’m afraid to be around people within 2 days of wearing it. But it doesn’t change the fact that I love it.

This is the first Pineward that hasn't worked with my skin chemistry and that I've actively disliked. Sniffing the atomiser and on paper, it wasn't one of my favorites, but seemed like it could be interesting. In my notes, I described the blotter test as "SUPER fresh and green, reminds me of freshly crushed mint in the garden". Those are things I generally like.

However, on my skin it turns into an extremely bitter woody scent. At first there was enough freshness that I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, but it only got worse as time went on. It smells pretty much exactly like Encre Noir, which I can't wear as I find the bitterness sickening. This doesn't have the beast mode performance of Encre Noir, but it's still one of the more persistent Pinewards, enough so that I had to scrub it off as it was annoying me (and making me sneeze).

Reading other people's reviews of this make me think I surely can't be smelling the same fragrance. Sweet? Pine tree? Powdery? Balsamic? "spicy amber wood" (the olfactory category my decant supplier puts it in)? I don't get any of that. Just this overwhelming bitterness that I feel like I can almost taste. Such a shame...

This was an incredibly evocative olfactory experience. Only in the initial moments after spraying did I smell a photorealistic mint cocoa beverage. After a few moments on my skin, it began to evolve into something far more atmospheric and complex. The cocoa here is very woody, but besides that, I can’t describe exactly what I smell in this fragrance. It feels like a perfect replica of places I’ve been before - buildings more specifically, the old Victorian houses of my city with narrow staircases and well-worn carpet, decorative bas relief on the ceiling cornices, and no insulation; cigarette and fireplace smoke soaked into wooden furniture and upholstery over many decades.
Having not stepped foot in such a house since I was a child, this fragrance unexpectedly hit me with an overload of nostalgia. I have a soft spot for “old building” scents for this very reason, but I never could have guessed from looking at the notes that Mint Cocoa was going to be one of the best representatives of the genre. I just wish I knew what notes to look for to find more scents like this.

I first smelled this delightful fragrance in a body lotion. I had been looking for the perfect realistic gardenia scent for ages but never quite found anything that smelled like the gardenias I’m familiar with here in Australia. The closest I got was actually Fleurs d'oranger but that has other stuff going on as well.

Then I happened to use a body lotion with the Snow Gardenia scent (MOR also makes body products) and I immediately recognised the gardenia I had been looking for. When I discovered they make a fragrance version as well, I immediately had to buy it. The fragrance smells identical to the lotion.

The gardenia in Snow Gardenia is predominantly creamy, but also fresh and slightly green or tart. It has this depth and dimensionality to it that makes it feel more natural and like a whole flower rather than an abstract rendition of one, but it’s also incredibly pure. Smelling this, I don’t picture anything other than gardenia, gardenia, gardenia everywhere. This is a creamy lotion-like white floral that feels luxurious and isn’t cloying or heavy, but still has impressive projection (on me).

Parfumo is missing the note pyramid, but on the website it’s described as:
Top Notes: Lemon, Bergamot
Middle Notes: Angelica, Gardenia, Juniper Berry, Ylang Ylang
Base Notes: Vanilla, Musk, Amber, Sandalwood