11 years ago
I adore Fresh Floral fragrances that are silky-smooth and neither too sweet nor too tart. I also like some of the Clean Floral Aquatics, but only if they inhabit the distinctly feminine side of the scent spectrum. I tend to enjoy a variety of fruity and refreshing Green/Floral-Green top notes as long as they are not overtly astringent or acidic. I flatly detest gourmand scents saturated with sickly-sweet-overly ripened fruit, vanilla, coconut, caramel, chocolate, milk, sugar, and/or drowning in a foul low-quality-patchouli based broth. I like to eat food, not wear it. Heavily animalic doses of civet, leather, musk, castoreum, or anything with that grotesquely awful salty decomposing sea life accord is nauseatingly repellent to me as well.
I like a base of fine woods, grasses, orris root, and very light musks laced with a touch of amber and a few subtle spices here and there. I especially enjoy a fine vetiver, sandalwood, cypress, cedar, or bamboo. I love to burn very high quality Japanese incense in my home. That being said, I dislike many perfumes with incense listed as a major component because the incense ingredients used in them are cheap, acrid, headache inducing, and remind me of Far Eastern Asian funeral rituals.
The same applies to the much vaunted "oudh" ingredient. I don't think there is a more beautiful scent than high quality kyara agarwood. A number of Japanese incense companies sell pure kyara incense and it is indeed the epitome of beauty, serenity, and meditative richness encapsulated in scent. However, many perfumes I have sampled with "oudh" listed as the major ingredient do not use this high quality kyara. I don't like them either from a bottle sniff, a tester card spray, or on my skin. I find that low-grade "oudh" is rankly hideous. It smells of a muddy, medicinal, putrid barn filled with hay, feces, and spilled turpentine.
With regard to fragrances, I am as always, in search of an ever more profoundly beautiful, exquisitely fresh floral that is superbly blended, smooth, and elegant.