Amouage samples on the way. Worth the hype?

Yes, they're good. They are deep, thick, rich, finely polished, and spare not expense. They are all memorable, have stand-out compositions, and are, to coin a phrase, anti-wimpy. I love a few, and respect the rest. A truly good house.

Depends on the fragrance.

Homage? Baffled. Just don't get the hype. Ubar? Magical - in my top ten.

Your mileage may vary.

1. They DO worth their prices.
2. Amouage isnt about hype. It's a fact that Amouage is THATTTTTTTTTTTTT good.
3. Dia, Reflection, Epic, Jubilation, and Lyric . The bold ones are good. Dia is overrated. I havent tested Reflection.

Hope you will enjoy them, at least for the experience.

Tested almost all EdP's and (only one among attars-) Homage. Their customer service sucks, they make you feel unimportant. That being said, I judge fragrances not customer service fools.

The short version: the EdP's are very good... compare them with what was left of the big French houses... mostly shadows of their glorious selves, no matter how much Luca Turin would be gushing in hyperbolic five stars reviews... there's no comparison in terms of concentration, seriousness of purpose... however, I enjoy these (Amouage EdP's) more like something to be enjoyed as an experience, not to be had as a full-volume product. Experimental in a good way.

Homage: it took me a while to appreciate it properly, but now I (think I) do and I just ordered a full attar bottle... and I'm not rich... it's that good... it's one of those few things you don't care whether others approve of, you just need it for yourself. Again, it's that good. As good as the best of Creed. The only one so far among what I tried.

Hillaire's Basenotes review of Homage sums up its best qualities splendidly.

Agreed. It`s my favourite perfume-house. All of the male EDP are very high quality. The edp`s from Amouage gives me all I expect from a niche brand of this calibre. All of them smell good, but that doesn`t mean that I can use all of them. Gold is just to much for me to tolerate. To many sprays of this will make you sick.. There is no longevity problems with Amouage.

IMO, I will rank them like this:

1. Jubilation xxv. -This is the best fragrance I have smell so far. Ever! My favourite.
2. Epic. -Heavy stuff! masculine, powerful and strong. Not for kids! A masterpiece.
3. Dia. -Luxurious and refined for elegant day wear. IMO, also for evening wear.
4. Ciel. -Very unique complex fresh floral scent for men. Perfect for spring/summer.
5. Silver. -Classical, very elegant, "workhorse" scent. Fresh, crisp, woody and spicy. Smells great on eny occations.
6. Lyric. -Great floral rose based scent with strong sillage and longevity. Quite unique as a male-perfume.
7. Reflection. -In the Joop homme/Fleur du Male/Givenchy Pi-family. Smells nice, but can be to much if oversprayed.
8. Gold. -Luxurious, dense, and elegant. Expencive smell. To feminine for my taste..

Homage would be still worth it if it was twice the price IMO . I dont get the longevity that other people seem to , about 6 hours but what a 6 hours - Im almost tempted to say that its the #1 in my wardrobe and I love all my smells . Same with Tribute . Have tried Epic Lyric and Reflection and think they are all excellent

A little off-topic, but where did you get your samples from? I live in Kuwait and ironically it's really hard to find them here, let alone sample.

You can buy small atomizers with Amouage at www.parfumsraffy.com

This eBay seller is located in Kuwait. I have found her reliable. Here is her page of Amouage currently on eBay:

http://shop.ebay.com/universal-perfu...911.m270.l1313

I don't judge a house by one or two fragrances but this is a recent experience...

When I had with Reflection on, I was swamped with memories of...
-- my grandmother's cheap urinal cakes
-- cheap Halloween candy
-- the detergent aisle of a dollar store
-- a hint of body odor from some Indian taxi driver guy
-- some retched hippie thing from the 1970's (patchouli?)

This nightmare was long due to the oil-to-alcohol ratio.

I tried Lyric Man.

This is a special one. A very fresh rose like no other.
To my surprise it's quite feminine.

You can expect some attention from the girls with this as they seem to love it.

Most people need some time to "get" Epic, but when you first do, it`s almost hypnotic! By the way, it smells different when spraying from a bottle compared to a sample-vial. This is a "spray-in-air-walk-through" scent.

Well said and I agree.

Mimi very recently sent me some pretty terrific samples with Ubar and Homage Attar included. I have Ubar on one forearm and Attar on the other.

I am liking both very much and am eager to sample them again very soon to review them both.

Reflection is one of the finest fragrances out there, imo. It has so many dualities it is crazy - it is modern and yet classic, sweet and yet full bodied, refined and yet playful, light and dark, compositionally heavy in some ways and yet so transparent in others. The key with Reflection is not to overdo it - 1 or, at most, 2 sprays is plenty. Glad you are enjoying what has essentially become my signature fragrance (by virtue of the fact that I tend to wear it 2 or 3 times a week because I crave it so.)

I just sampled some Amouage at the only chain store that sells them here, a little pricier than elsewhere. Sadly I only got them sprayed on strips since I kept getting assaulted by sales assistant not understanding that "I'm only here to smell amouage".

Anyhow, this is by no means my a significant first impression since the test wasn't on my skin. But Reflection and Gold are amazing (2 of the three I smelled). It's hard to describe the scents, they're not very "ground breaking" but they smell so pure and the notes flow perfectly. Though considering none of the scents "WOW"ed me on it's own, they're still not worth the price to me. I rather get an 5 excellent scents done moderately over a single good scent which is done perfectly. But I'm yet to test J XXV and Dia, maybe they'll make acquiring an amouage bottle worth it.

They lasted a good while on the scent strips, much better than any other complex scent I've had sprayed on paper, but you know what they say about fragrances that smell good on paper...God if only the sales assistant wasn't showing me the next perfume before I even sniff the one I just got. I mean...do these people even know scents need time to unfold?

Received a sample of this one (my first Amouage) yesterday, and am trying it for the first time tonight. I have to agree--very nice and very much reminds me of something a mature woman would wear.

Interesting.
I personally see a mature woman wear C&S No.88, a more dark dirty rose.
Lyric Man is a very fresh fragrance which I think would suit a younger woman better imo.

I am kind of wondering how Lyric Woman smells...
I mean if the male version is already this feminine, the female must be uber-feminine!

Perhaps I should have said "well-heeled woman." It has class. Although to my nose it lacks any kind of a sweet or musky base, which I find fitting for younger women. This has a lot of blossom, and "jumps out" at you more than others so maybe that's throwing me off. Whatever it is, it makes me think of 35-45 y/o women with equal parts taste and disposable income.

Maybe I'll feel differently sometime tomorrow afternoon when this stuff begins to calm down. It is definitely some potent stuff.


Funny you should mention C&S No 88, too, because I have a sample of it on my other wrist. It's......something.

I need to try these! In time I shall.. in time.

The Lyric Woman is rather more 'masculine'; I figured they played a bit with the concept. Woman is rosier, but less generically floral and has a very strong sandalwood drydown.
I figure the sharp 'ginger attack' at the front of man was the comapny's rationale for it's being chosen for the 'masculine' market. I wear both, and possibly prefer Man.

As for man, it requires time to drydown, and I thin one needs to know its sillage to know its full personality. I fond it really delightful.

But do you think the masculine "ordinary" man, dears to wear a scent like Lyric?

The only one's I've tried are XXV, and Lyric Man. XXV just doesn't appeal to me. Lyric Man is quite floral, and strikes me as a bit too feminine. They just are not for me.

Damn, that was creepy huh?


Thank you Hillaire for clearing that up.

So the Man version is for woman and the Woman version is for man...
Only with Amouage!

I don't even know the difference anymore between men & man and women and woman! Forgive me, English is not my native language.

Except for Homage, which recently became one of my favorite five scents ever, I go back and forth on Amouages... I don't try to be excessively wobbly, these are good professional scents and so on and so forth but... good as they are, they sometimes give me a headache (Lyric Man). Today I wore for the fourth time Jubilation XXY (with a little Creed Windsor on the other wrist)... the difference was staggering... Jubilation smelled good at times and literally anoying at other times - Windsor remained a reigning masterpiece... even if I now detect a slight artificial base-note in Windsor as well.

I've also tried out some Xerjoff... when it comes to EdP rather than attars (which of course Xerjoff does not produce), Xerjoff wins hands down in my opinion. They actually smell good from top to bottom (tried Kobe and Uden so far and liked them both quite a bit - it's not all about the composition, the quality of the ingredients makes a biiig difference).

Larwiz, it is good to see you back posting on the boards. I hope you find the niche samples compelling.

The only Amouage I have worn in Lyric Man. Very good stuff, although I need to wear it more to get a better grasp of the fragrance. Unlike others, I find Lyric Man to be quite masculine. A fresh rose, but masculine. Anyone who thinks that this smells feminine really needs to try more rose scents marked as "feminine" in the Basenotes directory. That'll teach ya.

I too find that Lyric Man is, if not masculine, definitely not overtly feminine. My girlfriend finds it quite masculine on my skin, and absolutely LOVES it (she also loves things like L'Anarchiste, Serge Noire and M7, so she definitely likes heavier, masculine scents). I found it especially interesting that my girlfriend's mother, when smelling Lyric Man from under the cap, said it smelled like a scent for a masculine, outdoors kind of man.

On me, the ginger, angelica, and later nutmeg, saffron and cedar balance the feminine aspect of the rose and vanilla quite nicely. I don't find the particular rose accord to be that feminine though - it's not heavy, thick, syrupy or particularly fruity here - but instead lighter, dewy, green and ethereal.

I honestly find Reflection Man to be more feminine overall than Lyric Man (of course, I love them both, and any feminine qualities in either I find to be tempered enough by the masculine qualities that I feel it creates an interesting dualistic mix, rather than something that is unbalanced into the ostentatiously feminine realm.)

The only male scents from Amouage that gives a feminine aura (imo), is Gold and Reflection.. Unfortunately Reflection gives me a terrible headache, and makes me almost sick! It`s a odd, "screwed", remarkable smell, with monster-sillage and longevity.. I have tried and tried, several times now to learn to like it, but I must realize that the battle is lost! OVER AND OUT!

Yes, they are worth the hype.
They take their time and it shows.

I`m glad you like it. When I smelled it from the sample, I liked it. When I sprayed it from the bottle, is was just to much for me to tolerate...Futile money!

So today I went to another store which carries amouage here, with no SA pressure, And wow...I was blown away.

Now I wasn't blown away by the scents themselves, like I was blown away with some average perfumes (YSL M7, Pure Malt). But rather blown away with the quality and complexity of the fragrances. Amouage seems to me like a fragrance that only the experiences nose can appreciate, and you can't get full grip of it right away due to the complexity. The most notable thing is how those perfumes open; they don't open with a top notes choking you, yet one spray lasts long enough and develops quite well. It's hard to explain what I mean, you won't notice how good the quality of Amouage is until you think of other perfumes you tried and how a random spray in the store doesn't really tell you much and is usually quite illusive.

Now as for the scents, these are the ones I tried and how I rank them:
1. Dia: my favorite, deep, somewhat sweet. Seems to work great as both a casual and a formal scent, yet it's not really an "inbetween" scent, you really get the best of both
2. Gold: This one smells expensive, and I can smell some Oud in there, I really like it but it's a little too formal for me.
3. Jubiliation xxv: This one is really unique, it has a very strong note that I haven't smelled in any other perfume. But it's really not for everyone, it sometimes smells to me like a herb we use here in the middle east for cooking, so I'm torn in this one.
4. Lyric for Women: Flowery and powdery, yet really unique and strong, I might get this one after Dia.
5. Reflection: This is a clam sort of powdery men scent, reminds me of Givenchy Pi. It's quite good, but there are many perfumes similar to it so you get a GIT vs Cool water delima here
6. Ciel: This seems like their casual scent, it's deep yet casual. It's the closest thing to a fresh scent they have.
7. Epic for men/women: nothing memorable in either, I like the women's one better though. EDIT: Epic actually developed into something very pleasant, I have to do more testing

Overall, they're all great. Few really impressed me with being unique, but that's not what makes Amouage stand out to me. It's really the quality that sets Amouage apart, And not everybody would appreciate that. But again, they're unique enough for the average nose to appreciate, but they're only worth the price for an experienced nose to appreciate.

P.S. I asking the SA if they sell samples, and he said no but he had a Lyric for men and Ubar for women sprayer samples, and gave them to me for free! I'm so happy and can't wait to actually try them for a day wear. Don't be shy to ask a nice sales assistant for samples! this was my first time and I got two samples of the most expensive perfumes in their store.

After Ubar, Ciel For Him is an unexpected favorite of mine from this house. It's lovely polished woody-incense fragrance to my nose, and while woody-incense is not my favorite genre, I know it's a popular one around here, so I'm surprised it doesn't get more love.

-I love it! It`s my favourite spring/summer fragrance.

I totally agree that the most 'feminine' of the bunch are Gold Man and Reflection Man, both of which I also wear happily. My BF likes Gold man on me very much and even requests it!

And I love Lyric Man on him, which he wears quite often; moreover, I'd say he's categorically 'masculine', if not'ordinary'

I love about the Amouage house in general how 'crossovery' they all are! Despite their "Man' and 'Woman' labels. Epic Woman, Jubilation 25, and Lyric Woman (as well as Gold Woman) are great on men, and would not strike anyone as odd, I think. My BF bought Jubilation 25 just for himself, and pointed out accurately that it's very reminiscent of HdP's Marquis de Sade.

Also, aside from Gold Man, Reflection Man, and Lyric Man, I really like to wear Ciel Man and Silver Cologne.

Soo.. if Ciel is only "casual" fragrance Amouage has, is there any point in trying Amouage (except of new experience) if I am NOT rich businessman wearing suit and tie daily?