African Night
by AbdesSalaam Attar Profumo

African Night (Notte Africana) has a light and very soft relaxing scent of cool night breezes and exhalaing floral woods. This fragrances is YlangYlag tinted with grapefruit in the opening and rosewood at the base. The primary scent is Ylang-Ylang and at first this smells like a high quality soliflore Ylang essential oil used in relaxation response for aromatherapy. It is a very relaxing and calming fragrance. There is a cool tropical night air scent that comes from the mix of grapefruit with ylang, layered over rosewood. The rosewood adds an exotic ethnic dry incense wood base that invites comparison to the incense floral, Timbuktu from L' Artisan. I give this a thumbs up, but its simplicity, although pleasant to smell is not much more than a simple but pure high quality Ylang essential oil. Simple this might be, but it does smell good!

8th July, 2011.

On paper, I smelled Star Jasmine, the kind I used to have growing outside my house in northern California. When baking in the sun, Star Jasmine has a different quality than at night. African Night's jasmine smells more of the cool scent I smell from Star Jasmine in the evening--sweet and cool, a bit less indolic than during daytime. The jasmine fades to reveal ylang ylang, and it has the typical lemon-woody on the verge of furniture polish smell that I associate with this essence. The floral combination is rather intoxicating and also gives a sense of calm. I am not sure if there is actually spice in this fragrance, but I do smell a little bit of clove. Some flower essences such as carnation give this effect. It is very pretty, and the floral accord seems to last a long time. I really love the softly spicy drydown. Overall, it smells mostly floral and is a rather soothing scent.

On my skin, I can detect the jasmine and ylang ylang quite strongly. However, unlike smelling AN on paper, I smell a gasoline note. The gasoline note is somewhat like what I found in Profumo's two African Queen fragrances (on paper), but not quite as overpowering. There is definitely an animalic tone which I didn't find to be as forward on paper. I do not feel nearly as calmed with this fragrance on my skin, probably because the gasoline note, while greatly subdued compared to African Queen, is a bit offputting. As the fragrance starts to dry, I smell the hint of spice I noticed before.

African night really comes on strong in the top notes, but settles quickly. Unfortunately, I feel like I can't even get in the door with it. For me, it is obviously better if it is not used as a personal fragrance, but rather on paper or other evaporation method in a similar application to aromatherapy. I recommend testing this, especially for jasmine lovers. It is really quite lovely!

27th June, 2009.