Seatonica

From the plethora of notes listed I can only really detect neroli, rosewood and cassia in the opening. Then the base notes emerge and that's where Amariage settles quietly on me becoming a woody-vanillary-ambery-musk. It's a pretty, comforting and well-made perfume that lingers for hours and reminds me of autumn leaves, but to my mind it's not an especially complex one. Judging by the wide range of responses here it seems that how you experience Amariage will have a great deal to do with your skin chemistry as Missk says.

How I love this rich concoction of heady flowers and pungent spices! Specifically, what I love is the striking combiation of narcissus and pink pepper on a base of cedar spiked with oily sesame, making this perfume at once exotic, comforting and funereal. With fabulous longevity and great sillage, conjuring bright bazars, Victorian cemeteries and ancient coffers, Onde Extase just blows me away.

Looking at the notes I should love Gucci Flora, but something in the opening makes my nose twitch. As in allergy oh no I'm going to sneeze twitch. So it's not love I'm feeling as my sinuses fill up. Is peony the culprit? Or maybe the osmanthus? I think it's the osmanthus. The osmanthus note here is very similar to the one found in those eponymous perfumes that come out of China, more green and cloying than honeyed. And sorry to say I find this particular rendition of osmanthus, which blooms heady early on and lasts for hours on me, headache-inducing in a way I do not find in Keiko Mercheri's Osmanthus, for example, which I adore. It quite spoils my enjoyment of the powdery rose-patchouli combination that emerges in the middle stages as Lola observes. I have to thank the lovely rubyred for the sample but all this is to say that surprisingly Gucci Flora is not for me.

The notes I get from the Guy Laroche original are, in progression, aldehydes, then peach, followed by a spike of coriander/cedar (?) and finally amber/benzoin/oakmoss. In two hours J'ai Ose is a chypre whisper - not so much green as golden and surprisingly quite understated on me. I can see myself wearing J'ai Ose at all times of the year. Just lovely, and the longevity is excellent too.

Escape is Indian summer in a bottle. Strangely it holds no beach associations for me but instead conjures those golden blue sky days that segue sunny and warm into the Australian autumn.