Canali Style (2008)
by Canali

Somewhere between dark oriental gourmand and leather is where you’ll find Canali Style. There’s a lot of the roasted coffee vibe from Yohji Homme in here, plus some of the powdery licorice of Lolita Lempicka au Masculin, but all these edibles are tempered by a dark, smoky accord which renders the composition far less cloying to me than those other two.

The foundation includes some of the crude, fuzzy, woody base notes that spoil many recent masculines for me, (Guerlain Homme comes to mind,) but in Canali Style’s case the offending accord does not dominate as completely as it does elsewhere. I attribute this to an astringent edge on the lingering leathery accord that effectively cuts the suffocating synthetic blanket. I myself don’t find it original enough to get excited about, but if you enjoy woody gourmand men’s scents and find Lolita Lempicka au Masculin, A*Men, or Le Mâle too sweet or overbearing, Canali Style might be worth a try.

Quintessentially run-of-the-mill Italian on it's own, but early one morning I stumbled upon good use for it: By carelessly IDing my perfumedcourt.com samples, I discovered that I could extend the dregs of my 2.5ml Jubillation XXV by layering two sprays of the Amouage with one of the Canali. This creates an interesting effect: The Canali barely changes the character of Jubilation except to mask some of the fruit, enhance the fresh/woody aspect of the incence accord and to extend the overall persistance, all of which is probably a result of the heavy use of ISO E Super used in the Canali.

Painfully average and dull. It smells great on first application... and several subsequent applications. One can barely smell it on themselves. It does, however have a strange sillage the sits around you in the location of where you've been spraying. So what's it smell like? A spicy, woody that's very watery and definitely Italian. A strange style indeed.