Hello Everyone,
Glad to be here in this extremely informative and social Oud forum, and looking forward to interacting with everyone.
I am also a member of Basenotes, which led me to being a member of Ouddict.com as there was an exile to that site due to a legendary Oud subforum being cruelly excised, which led me to here. I intend to be active on both forums simultaneously.
For brevity's sake I will crosspost a couple of items I posted there, one on this post being an introduction of myself and my first ever foray into the wonder of Oud. I see no rules forbidding doing so in the FAQ, but please feel free to correct me if I have erred.
Warm Regards To All,
Bob.
Cross-Post from Ouddict.com below: http://www.ouddict.com/threads/oud-reviews.2/page-13
These are my first forum posts ever containing an introduction of myself (feel free to skip to the reviews) and concerning scent or perfume of any kind, will cross-post this to other forums though, especially the basenotes Oud forum, that I am so sad that I missed by ony a few months it seems. Directly inspired to write this because of my immediate love of Oud and the dire circumstances under which I was impelled to try them.
To be candid, they enthuse me on a level that few other pleasures do. The actual reviewing took me almost a month and more to do, because whenever I tried a new scent I usually just blissed out about it before being dragged back into the magical world of poopy and desitin, that is, zinc oxide and cod liver oil nappy rash cream. It's as effective as it is unsavoury, though.
So, to begin...
I hated perfume.
One of the strongest memories of my childhood was the nausea and headache after being dragged into 70's / early 80's Edinburgh department stores and being overloaded with the noxious cloud coming from all the perfume counters that you would have to trek through, breath firmly held, in order to get to the women's clothes section where my mother would spend as it seemed, endless hours. It was the somme, housewife's verson for me.
In my teens and early 20's I finally settled on a scent that I found not to be completely disgusting, and which did not fade out on my skin after two or three hours as most did: Chanel's Antaeus, but quickly went off it when my friend 'stole' it for himself. After that I went to Napier's herbal pharmacy and tried some natural essential oils there that were a little feminine but tolerable. After moving to London in the late 90's for the first time I simply had no time or inclination for strong scents as I was cooking for a living 80+ hours a week and was normally surrounded by pungent herbs and spice, the aroma of stocks and gravies.
Fast forward past a massive change of career to working in software testing, experiencing Amouage Epic sometime around 2013. Totally smitten, an exotic, bold scent that was my sole narcotic, the only fragrance that I felt was well worth the money, (sorry Roja, you came very close, but oh, the price!) bought at least half a dozen bottles and wore it daily, applying several times a day before something went terribly wrong with it, took it back to the shop to swap for another bottle but was told that due to regulations (thanks a bunch, corrupt EU / IFRA!) that was it.
Depressed.
Fast forward to the present day... looking after initially two and now three small children full time in Oklahoma of all places. No, not the musical.
Barnyard notes? Really? Don't you dare wax lyrical about excessive barnyard notes unless you have changed stinky, stinky, disgusting diapers from three adorable little monsters all at once after they have eaten different foods that day, and drunk formula, two of which have lactose intolerence and were fed cheesecake. *shudders*
Despite the surprisingly clean air of Oklahoma I was getting rapidly depressed not just due to the sleep deprivation but it was mostly the decidedly *un*fecalicious lovecraftian horrors my little monsters were pooping out their respective cracks of doom that Sauron, the dark lord of middle-earth would be proud of. Enough was enough, I looked into trying to get a replacement for epic for the sake of sanity, researched what it was made of thanks to fragrantia and found that much of the scent was from something called oud.
Annoyingly, I live nowhere near a no holds barred custom perfumier and up until very recently could not travel, so that option was right out the window. Next step was to order the ingredients and try to cobble together a reasonable facsimilie myself.
I did my usual level of research and the general consensus that Ensar Oud was among the top artisan producers, but also on my shortlist was Feel Oud, Agar Aura, Imperial Oud, Sultan Oudh, Oudimentary and Al Shareef Oudh in no particular order. Don't care what name is on the bottle, the bottom line will always be: does it smell amazing? In addition, I plan to order samples from each of the companies mentioned and review at a later date.
I ordered a lot of samples from EO, and below are my reviews of each, however basenoters, please do be gentle with me and forgive my lack of vocabulary and knowledge, this is the first time in my life I have experienced straight Ouds, and what stunners at that, I think. I am doing semi-blind testing as obviously I read up on them before I ordered but have purposely not looked at the descriptions since delivery. Subconciously there might be some bias, but what can I do?
All reviews are chronological in nature, I will try to document how the scent changes on my skin at regular intervals, however the order of the Ouds reviewed are out of order somewhat. I will be evaluating some in a structured manner for the first time while writing this extremely long winded post, others I will transcribing from notepad. The first Ouds I tried were Aroha Kyaku, Tigerwood 1995 and Borneo 50k.
Glad to be here in this extremely informative and social Oud forum, and looking forward to interacting with everyone.
I am also a member of Basenotes, which led me to being a member of Ouddict.com as there was an exile to that site due to a legendary Oud subforum being cruelly excised, which led me to here. I intend to be active on both forums simultaneously.
For brevity's sake I will crosspost a couple of items I posted there, one on this post being an introduction of myself and my first ever foray into the wonder of Oud. I see no rules forbidding doing so in the FAQ, but please feel free to correct me if I have erred.
Warm Regards To All,
Bob.
Cross-Post from Ouddict.com below: http://www.ouddict.com/threads/oud-reviews.2/page-13
These are my first forum posts ever containing an introduction of myself (feel free to skip to the reviews) and concerning scent or perfume of any kind, will cross-post this to other forums though, especially the basenotes Oud forum, that I am so sad that I missed by ony a few months it seems. Directly inspired to write this because of my immediate love of Oud and the dire circumstances under which I was impelled to try them.
To be candid, they enthuse me on a level that few other pleasures do. The actual reviewing took me almost a month and more to do, because whenever I tried a new scent I usually just blissed out about it before being dragged back into the magical world of poopy and desitin, that is, zinc oxide and cod liver oil nappy rash cream. It's as effective as it is unsavoury, though.
So, to begin...
I hated perfume.
One of the strongest memories of my childhood was the nausea and headache after being dragged into 70's / early 80's Edinburgh department stores and being overloaded with the noxious cloud coming from all the perfume counters that you would have to trek through, breath firmly held, in order to get to the women's clothes section where my mother would spend as it seemed, endless hours. It was the somme, housewife's verson for me.
In my teens and early 20's I finally settled on a scent that I found not to be completely disgusting, and which did not fade out on my skin after two or three hours as most did: Chanel's Antaeus, but quickly went off it when my friend 'stole' it for himself. After that I went to Napier's herbal pharmacy and tried some natural essential oils there that were a little feminine but tolerable. After moving to London in the late 90's for the first time I simply had no time or inclination for strong scents as I was cooking for a living 80+ hours a week and was normally surrounded by pungent herbs and spice, the aroma of stocks and gravies.
Fast forward past a massive change of career to working in software testing, experiencing Amouage Epic sometime around 2013. Totally smitten, an exotic, bold scent that was my sole narcotic, the only fragrance that I felt was well worth the money, (sorry Roja, you came very close, but oh, the price!) bought at least half a dozen bottles and wore it daily, applying several times a day before something went terribly wrong with it, took it back to the shop to swap for another bottle but was told that due to regulations (thanks a bunch, corrupt EU / IFRA!) that was it.
Depressed.
Fast forward to the present day... looking after initially two and now three small children full time in Oklahoma of all places. No, not the musical.
Barnyard notes? Really? Don't you dare wax lyrical about excessive barnyard notes unless you have changed stinky, stinky, disgusting diapers from three adorable little monsters all at once after they have eaten different foods that day, and drunk formula, two of which have lactose intolerence and were fed cheesecake. *shudders*
Despite the surprisingly clean air of Oklahoma I was getting rapidly depressed not just due to the sleep deprivation but it was mostly the decidedly *un*fecalicious lovecraftian horrors my little monsters were pooping out their respective cracks of doom that Sauron, the dark lord of middle-earth would be proud of. Enough was enough, I looked into trying to get a replacement for epic for the sake of sanity, researched what it was made of thanks to fragrantia and found that much of the scent was from something called oud.
Annoyingly, I live nowhere near a no holds barred custom perfumier and up until very recently could not travel, so that option was right out the window. Next step was to order the ingredients and try to cobble together a reasonable facsimilie myself.
I did my usual level of research and the general consensus that Ensar Oud was among the top artisan producers, but also on my shortlist was Feel Oud, Agar Aura, Imperial Oud, Sultan Oudh, Oudimentary and Al Shareef Oudh in no particular order. Don't care what name is on the bottle, the bottom line will always be: does it smell amazing? In addition, I plan to order samples from each of the companies mentioned and review at a later date.
I ordered a lot of samples from EO, and below are my reviews of each, however basenoters, please do be gentle with me and forgive my lack of vocabulary and knowledge, this is the first time in my life I have experienced straight Ouds, and what stunners at that, I think. I am doing semi-blind testing as obviously I read up on them before I ordered but have purposely not looked at the descriptions since delivery. Subconciously there might be some bias, but what can I do?
All reviews are chronological in nature, I will try to document how the scent changes on my skin at regular intervals, however the order of the Ouds reviewed are out of order somewhat. I will be evaluating some in a structured manner for the first time while writing this extremely long winded post, others I will transcribing from notepad. The first Ouds I tried were Aroha Kyaku, Tigerwood 1995 and Borneo 50k.
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