Except for one, none of the perfumes in this collection are terribly animalic, all of them use exquisite materials like real sandalwood, oud, and jasmine, and most of them smell like whole, actualized perfumes rather than the sum of their parts. But then, the people who love perfumes for the entirety of their composition or for the personalized soundtrack they provide to the mundanity of the everyday are upset enough that the Dior Addict or the Hermes Hiris are no longer available, so can you imagine their feelings about perfumes that sell out and become unobtanium in the space of a weeks, if not days?
Perhaps it is best that only the oud heads and sandalwood obsessives that lurk in dark corners of the Internet get to smell these. Sounds amazing, right? And it is. But what the perfume-wearing GenPop want is for a beloved perfume to smell reliably the same from one day to the next, and ideally, from one bottle to the next. The naturals used in Areej Le Dore perfumes are too mercurial and unreproducible to guarantee that level of security.
My favorite of this series and the easiest to wear, it has nonetheless never smelled the same way on me the three times I have donned it. Soft yet strong, like a photo I recently saw of Jean Harlow one day before her death from kidney failure, her delicate yet bloated frame held firmly in place by her co-stars Clark Gable and Walter Pidgeon, who seemed to sense she was near collapse.
The final aftertaste, however, was of the delicate Indian attar-like floral sandalwood of Alamut by Lorenzo Villoresi, only airy and astringent where the Villoresi is sodden with sweet milk.
The second and third wearing immediately revealed the minty-camphoric sting of a clean island oud — like a Borneo, but in reality, an oud from the Philippines — sweeping in the medicinal radiance of hospital-grade antiseptic fluid. How had I missed this the first time around? Now I could smell the sharpness of lime leaf as well as the familiar richness of the sandalwood, which in its second outing smelled like a century old sandalwood elephant ground down into dust for zukoh incense.
