Mazzolari Ambra
by Mazzolari

This was my "spray and try" at Scent Bar today. It really has a sparkly cola smell with a amber undertone. I really liked it but it just sort of made me want to wear Hypnotic Poison which I like a bit more.

19th June, 2011.

My first disappointment from Mazzolari: excessively powdery and sweet with floral undertones, it doesn’t come across as an amber-centered scent at all. Luckyscent lists this as unisex. I think it definitely tends to feminine. Regardless, I do not like it.

12nd March, 2010.

Mazzolari’s Ambra opens on notes of bright bergamot and sweet spices, including a potent and peculiarly soapy ginger, which together make a much less moody or exotic impression than most amber-labeled compositions I know. Indeed, the ginger’s soapy flavor causes it to work almost like lavender, so that Ambra starts out smelling much more like a “barbershop” fougère than an oriental. The incongruous fougère impression diminishes as vanilla, jasmine, and labdanum take their places at the center of the composition. Yet if Ambra’s heart is more recognizably oriental in flavor than its opening, it’s an oriental of the floral persuasion, and still not the kind of spiced resin structure I’d expect out of something that calls itself “Amber.”

The expected sweet amber blanket does settle heavily over Ambra's powdery vanilla drydown, while the gradual dissipation of the floral notes re-exposes the soapy ginger from the opening. All that soap and sweet powder smell intensely “perfumey” in a manner that could be interpreted as “classical” but reads to me as dowdy. Ambra offers ample sillage and projection, with impressive staying power. Good news if you enjoy this scent, less of a perk if, like me, you find it uncomfortably square and stuffy.

11th December, 2009.