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Notes11/23/2015
Cheap & cheaper
Meh. Contrary to other flankers of this Colonia line, such as the beautiful Assoluta version and the at-least-wearable Leather one, this Intensa variation is quite disappointing for me. Actually much disappointing, even if my expectations with Acqua di Parma are never that high. It starts off as a sort of cheap dupe of a herbal-citrus fougère played on lemon-musky chords, tinged with a depressingly flat synthetic leather note and a surprisingly bold, and kind of harshly dissonant generic woody note (it takes a talent to make cedar smell this bad). It’s basically a “darker”, here meaning woodier and muskier take on the Colonia, but hasn’t really the quality and the class to succeed for me. It’s just... a shrug in a bottle, almost a scrubber. It’s uninspired, too cheap to be at least elegant and enjoyable, as it smells on the contrary almost tacky for how lousy and mediocre the notes smell. And even if they’re just a few and are all quite “classic”, for some reasons at some points their balance smells almost wrong. Too lemony at first, too harshly woody, too cheaply musky on the drydown. But well, I know “balance” is a rather subjective matter, so I guess someone may like that. Still a less than mediocre scent, whether the balance is fine or not. Anyway once the initial citrus and herbal notes start to vanish off, you realize that was the nicest part, and you basically remain with a simple, bland, immobile, surprisingly cheap soapy musky-cedar accord still tinged with a bold detergent-like debris of citrus and a remarkably irritating long persistence, as charming and pleasant as remaining stuck in a lift with that bald stinky colleague of yours.
4/10
4/10
