Landlord

Hach, it's always very exciting when a nice souk gives you a rare scent as an extra, especially when it's such a "handsome" high carat like "Master Jojo". To make matters worse, it is not available in good old Germany, but in all online shops it is "out of stock" or "no longer available" and Handsome-London-Shop also "currently unavailable". No rank coming thus to the smell and I can make you only ´ne long nose...

... Because the remaining millilitre is ´ne power. Above all, because it has much more to offer than the two quoted everyday ingredients patchouli and sandalwood. Even before the alcoholic note fades away, the top note is a winter revelation: pure rum pot, dried fruits in alcohol, warm wood, cosy depth. From the Patchouli a male sweetness and very beautiful earthiness remains in the smell process, the dry fruit note remains and reminds me orientally of dates and plum. And under it wood as I like it, sunlit, warm - and not as dry as sandalwood occasionally gives birth to...

"Master Jojo" is a really nice deep male aura scent with the discreet development I appreciate and the feeling that it comes directly from the skin rather than being applied to it. A great quality, neatly radiating and to all abundance also still of very tidy durability...

Solitary he seems to have gone off the rails. DAMAGE! All I have left is the millilitre...

Yes, I know, friends, you shouldn't do it, just like that, out of boredom, while your sweetheart is still looking for the perfect eyebrow pencil to spray on at the drugstore. But occasionally one discovers a surprising surprise in the low-price sector. And "Friction Him" seemed the most bearable of all the awful things on the shelf on paper.

On the skin, though... phew... there is such a... perhaps you know the... such a male cheap herb note, whose recipe is obviously passed on from one perfume manufacturer to the next and always comes across terribly? Where somehow everything is inside and it always seems to smell of the same green spice? Quasi the "Maggi"-extrat for the skin... So no matter what you cook, every dish tastes exactly the same when you let Maggi in...? Yes, do you know that? Oh, no matter, I vertrau´ just so that you know what I mean and now also what "Friction Him" smells like...

When I then read the scents at home, I already had to laugh very much... There's really everything in it: leather and fruit, maritime and flowers and spices. I remember my early attempts at painting, where I mixed all the colours of the paint box together and thought I would certainly create a new mad super colour - and yet always only dark brown came out...

Yes, well, okay, I could have been warned, "friction" also means friction, tension or in the figurative sense also disagreement. But the only thing that stretched were the nose wrinkles of the Landlady at the sniff test and the discrepancy that she kept pushing my sprayed test hand far away from her...

Well, I'm really not a horse racing friend and I don't have the smell of a jockey club right in my nose. But I can understand very well why the fragrance house Oriza L. Legrand, which I appreciate so much, combines this composition with horse racing. The three fragrances change in alternating concentration around each other... the flowery notes of the borders on the Jockeyplatz... the leather of the horse saddles... the agitated dark earth in the form of a hearty, smoky vetiver, through which an occasional hint of cigar smoke from a gnarled bookmaker wafts... This produces very nice pictures - and yet in its interplay it is an enormously independent but also quite bulky and not very harmonious affair.

The leather and vetiver notes - especially towards the end of the fragrance - have a beautiful, dark core. But what my skin can't cope with is a "flower stalk note" that reminds me of freshly cut flower stalks and covers the scent almost continuously with a slightly acidic layer that I can hardly bear. So far I haven't found a floral scent that my skin really likes, and the beautiful leather and vetiver parts in the "Gentry Jockey Club" can't wear out this embrasure either.

What a pity, as an Anglophile fragrance lover I would have liked "Gentry Jockey Club" and tried for a long time to get hold of a sample of the youngest Oriza L. Legrand. Thanks to an incredibly friendly offer from Parfuma Salander, I was finally allowed to try it. Even if it does not harmonize with my skin, it is a Legrand typical, finely made, very characteristic scent that could please lovers of olfactory challenges. There is nothing to complain about lacking durability and Sillage in any case!

After the original Eau Sauvage hadn't torn me from my stool despite our common birth year and I was horrified by the synthetic grassy Eau Sauvage EdC, I naturally met the 2017 Flanker in perfume concentration with skepticism - and made a stunning discovery!

In the beginning still a little too mainstreamig-sweet with hardly perceptible bergamot and rather gourmandiger Anmutung (however this comes off), the smell plays its full quality out, if after a good hour the Vetiver in interaction with resinous notes takes over the regiment. The warlike picture isn't quite right, though. The vetiver is deep and finely integrated, resinous, spicy, in deeper layers smoky to sniff out. That's male, that's striking, but also differentiated, that doesn't make you flat, that's perfect and leads to a delicate, sweet freshness that just holds the balance of not drifting off into powderiness...

The way I like it, the fragrance development after the somewhat killing prelude is very restrained. Every time I try out this classic masterpiece, I tend to perceive the components in different layers as iridescent. A fascinating scent experience and an aura scent in the best sense!

The Sillage is excellent, forces rather to careful spraying on, in order not to overpacen, and the durability is with 14 hours nearly too long... Nevertheless, "Eau Sauvage Parfum 2017" could be the first fragrance from a designer forge in my collection (with the exception of Hermessencen) and my two more striking Vetivers by Guerlain and Oriza L. Legrand could be placed in the second row if I feel like a deep and warm vetiver, which I also believe to have seductive qualities... one will see...

Oops, the "water of the black lemon" is discussed quite controversially here and it doesn't seem to really "hit". Astonishing! While there is a lot of harmony in the citric Eau de Cologne area, the "Eau de Citron Noir" is very pleasant. Oh what, pleasant: Dreamlike is better!

The very first minutes belong to a biting, spicy citrus prelude. The smell of the "Calabrian lemon" is unfortunately not present to me, but the top note reminds me of a fresh, ripe grapefruit, strong and herbaceous. That's good, that's nice, but of course it doesn't make this perfume so special. It flashes when after a few minutes the teen note is added, not a bitter East Frisian tea fix, but a mild black tea that changes wonderfully with the lemon. But it gets really exciting when, after about an hour, the scent of warm, sun-charged woods creeps in - whereby, surprisingly, each of the three components remains in the base note, the scent experience simply increases in complexity. This is a very special Eau-de-Cologne experience, dark and fresh, dry and cool, not a bit scratchy or beastly, harmonious, but anything but pleasing and extremely independently composed. For me a fragrance with a real WOW effect!

Well, the Sillage is "only" on a good EdC level after the dynamic start, but the durability of six hours is quite impressive and the bottle of a beautiful, dark and very matching night blue. I'm not really impressed by this, but I admit that I've always been fascinated by the bottles of Hermes' "colourful" Eau series in their simple yet extraordinarily striking design, but so far none of the fragrances they contain has really convinced me!

Well, now what's with the "black lemon"? As other reviewers before me have already explained, it is actually an Arabian lime that is boiled in salt water and then dried in the sun. The fruit turns black, the shrunken and Loomi fruits taste intensely fruity, smoky and sweetish earthy. I suspect that it would be very difficult (or in case of doubt expensive!) to extract essential oil from the Loomi and that Madame Nagel has reproduced this fragrance experience molecularly. But one way or another, a "water of black lemon" evokes dreamlike, Mediterranean-exotic associations that the fragrance does justice to. Chapeau!