Rasa
by Ava Luxe

Rasa starts out as a sweet, potent rose fragrance, with soft musk notes emerging below. The heart remains very simple: rose and powdery musk with a slight touch of sweet vanilla.

The musk becomes a bit sharper and more tangy as the scent dries down, but never to the point where I'd really call it animalic. In fact, Rasa stays very pretty all the way through. If there's any civet in this mix it gets lost in the blend. It's certainly not asserting itself as an individual note.

Rasa has very little projection or sillage on me after the first fifteen or twenty minutes. After an hour the accords have homogenized into a sweet, powdery, and "perfumey" floral on a musk base. The impression I get is of a very old-fashioned scent; something that wouldn't seem out of place on my grandmother. It's a pleasant enough fragrance if you want a musky rose scent that's not too threatening, but it certainly doesn't strike me as anything revolutionary.

24th December, 2009.

REVIEW FOR THE EXTREME VERSION:

Well, diversity of taste can only broaden the spectrum of art...!

This went from my most-hated fragrance to one I quite like. The top notes are loud, warm, searing and very dirty; perhaps the most vivid musk I've encountered in Western perfumery ( though still very much a meek lamb compared with Ajmal's Musk Gazelle ). The top notes can smell quite fecal initially.

Gradually the fragrance cools down and becomes a rough musk and civet blend, with a pleasant rose balancing it out. All in all fairly simple and linear, but quite pleasing and surprisingly transparent for a genre known for "thick" scents.

If what you want is a simple, loud, animalic musk, this is for you. After the first blast it's quite wearable, and recommended for anyone exploring the wild ones of the musk genre.

29th April, 2009.

Rasa Extreme

If I was about to think that animal notes are the greatest test to separate great perfumers from not-so-great, then I could not possibly praise perfumer behind this creation.

If I would compare this to Muscs Koublai Khan for instance, there is a huuuuge difference in art of blending. While MKK is skunky yet extremely sensual and natural at the same time, Rasa X-Treme just stands there and stink. It’s a simple and very semi professional blend of ingredients that should make a wonderfully erotic perfume.

It doesn’t necessarily make a good perfume if you put civet, musks and roses together. You have to get the balance exactly right.

This smells like a droppings of a cute rabbit which has been on a rose petal diet for a past few days.

3rd February, 2009.

I tested the Luxe Edition of Rasa.

Rasa notes: Indian Musk, Kenya Musk, Skin Musk, Egyptian Musk
Peruvian Balsam, Ambergris, Civit , Orris Root - (IRIS PALLIDA)
Russian Rose - (ROSA DAMASCENA) (from the Ava Luxe web site)

I smell resins, light amber and light musk. A little "perfumy" on first application, but acquires a sort of nutty "like skin only better" quality. Mostly it smells like a blend of musks with some florals added--I do not detect much in the way of civet. As the fragrance develops, the rose becomes rather strong--unusual since usually the floral notes fade rather quickly. I can tell this is the same type of boozy rose I really like, but in this composition it isn't working well for me. After some time, powder is becoming more prominent, probably from the orris, but it smells rather synthetic, almost like baby-powder. This helps bolster the rose a bit, but something about this frag just isn't clicking for me.

19th October, 2008.

The skankiest, roughest perfume I own...the X-treme version that is...and I love it! It comes on very strong in the musks, with a hint of dry rose, add some ambergris and civet, and you get a very earthy, in-your-face 'basic instinct' scent. Definitely animalic and skanky, but not putrid or nasty. An intersting artifact too, is that the rose seems to carry the musks, insead of the other way around. Drydown is fantastically mellow and sweetish, and it'll stay on your skin for days. I use only a drop on my skin...don't want anyone to keel over dead around me...but I love wearing it. I would never don this at work or a crowded public place...in fact, this is a very personal scent I keep to myself. Now, I spend a good part of every day with horses, so I may have a different view of 'animalic' than others, but I love the smell of barns and feed and horses. While Rasa doesn't smell exactly like any of those things, I believe appreciating them widens the basis for other, rawer scents. So if you're intrigued by a hot, arid, torrid, and musky scent, to try Ava's Rasa X-treme.

26th December, 2007.

(This review is for Rasa Extreme.) Smells like s--- and honey. Smells like, “Who s--- in the rose garden? “ Smells like the sweet scent of one’s own s---. I don’t know why I would buy this when I can just... Never mind. It becomes a nice-smelling, warm, dirty rose after two hours. Before that, I’m not brave enough to wear this in public. After that, it is really good. I wonder if I would like plain Rasa better--or If I would complain that it isn't dirty enough?

26th July, 2007.