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Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Saturday, October 06, 2007 2:05 AM (Eastern)
I wore a small amount of this the other day, and wore it completely today.It's a beautiful perfume, but it's also kind of...odd. When I tried it out in a small amount, it reminded me of...I want to say a Chanel scent, but I can't name the specific one (definitely not No. 5 nor Coco Mademoiselle, nor any of the newer Chanel perfumes).
Applied fully, you get the panoramic Montale experience, where the scent changes lavishly, each phase lasting several hours. But unlike the others I've tried--Aoud Roses Petals, Jasmin Full, Crystal Flowers and Powder Flowers--this is a bit of an odd composition, although, of course, the drydown is to die for.
Here's the description from the aedes.com site:
White Aoud weaves the tobacco and honey infused richness of precious oud into a luminous tapestry. The dusky, incense smoke imbued woods are contrasted with soft jasmine and creamy rose. The lemony brightness of cardamom lights up the composition, while warm amber and sandalwood offer a seductive backdrop for this beautiful oriental etude.
They're leaving out the saffron...I'm sure there's saffron in White Aoud. When I first put it on, I got the same oud-and-saffron blend that begins Aoud Roses Petals. But here, the oud doesn't seem to last as long, nor is it ever as strong. It's a bit of oud, but I wouldn't really describe White Aoud as "an oud scent."
The rose is also much subtler than in Roses Petals...it's there, it's that sort of "smells like good oranges" rose, but White Aoud doesn't strike as "a rose scent" either, it's much more blended than that.
Phase 2 sees White Aoud leaving the oud-and-saffron phase, and entering the unnamed Chanel scent phase. (It could be an old Guerlain scent I'm thinking of, but I don't think so, I really think it's Chanel.)
Phase 3, the drydown...White Aoud began to remind me fairly strongly of Etro Shaal Nur. It's not the same...Shaal Nur is distinctly lemon-and-incense to my nose, and White Aoud is the better of the two scents...more complex, with an ambery vanilla-and-woods thing going on to make things more interesting. But if you like Shaal Nur, you're almost sure to like White Aoud (and you'll probably like it better, unless you're a real lemon nut).
In White Aoud, the "lemony" note is attributed to cardamom (at least by aedes.com) but I think the oud has something to do with it as well. White Aoud is spicy, a bit...subtly spicy, not obvious spices. It's warm and spicy (again, a bit similar to Shaal Nur).
I keep wanting to strike Montale scents off my wishlist. :D It's not a cheap line, and I tend to want two, or at most three, bottles of perfume at a time, because that's the rate at which I use them up. I hate having a perfume go bad; it did happen to me once, when I was hoarding a Givenchy Organza edp. (The horror...I think I had a third of the bottle left. At least it was a relatively small bottle.)
I have eliminated Crystal Flowers from the list, at least. Not that it's a bad scent, by any means; it's a yummy rose-and-lily-of-the-valley scent, in the same vein as Gianfranco Ferré Lei, but softer and warmer. It's just that I can live without a rose-dominated scent. At least I keep telling myself that.
If you like older Chanel perfumes, or if you like Etro Shaal Nur, you will definitely want to try White Aoud. (Conversely, if you don't like these, you may not like White Aoud.)
image courtesy aedes.com
Labels: montale, perfume, perfume reviews
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