Bummer! This looked rad, but it's not sold in any Whole Foods in my region (SoCal).
FWIW: I called Nemat Int. (they're in N.Cal) and it is only select Whole Foods that carry this line. With that said, can anybody speak to the longevity of this one? I'd read awesome things about Auric Blends' Amber on here, ordered it, and found it to have lousy longevity. Anyone?
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Well, I bought the Nemat International Musk Amber to give it a spin, but I have to respectfully disagree that it smells like Ambre Sultan. I own Sultan, so I conducted a direct wrist to wrist test over a period of a few hours to get a sense of how they line up.
Whereas Sultan is a rich, powerful, and spicy scent, Nemat smells like a cross between nuts and plastic bags. It's sweeter than Sultan because of the musk, but much of the sweetness has a weird nutty cocoa thing component to it. Don't get me wrong, it's not awful, but it's your typical head-shop oil and nothing more. There's little in the way of amber (neither in the vein of the common sweet amber accord or the smokier amber of an actual resin) -- it's mainly a soft, sweet musk. As far as longevity and projection goes, I usually get around 6 - 8 hours with Sultan with strong projection for the first 2 hours or so. (The first 30 minutes are actually too strong, I find.) With Nemat, it sits very close to the skin and lasts around 30 minutes.
Now, I called several Whole Foods in my area, and none have ever carried this line. So I called Nemat themselves and they told me that select stores in the chain had them a little while ago, but they're no longer carried there. Instead, they're available through Amazon. When looking at the Amazon reviews, there were a series of complaints of it being a very weak, watery oil (it is), but they also seem to suggest that in the past it may have been stronger. This might explain other posters' reasoning for it being close to Sultan.
So, in summary, I'd guess it's about 30% similar to Sultan with maybe 5% of Lutens' power. As an amber nut who owns a ton of niche amber scents, I can say that a far closer version is Alkemia's Arabesque -- an etsy-based goth oil thing (not great, but far far better than this). I'd place that at about 70% in similarity to Sultan, and it's probably five times the strength of Nemat.
Last, in case there are other amber fans reading, there's another thread floating round that says that Auric Blend's Amber is a good cheapy. I tried that as well, and it's pretty terrible -- zero projection, gone within an hour. That one smell much closer to Histoire's Ambre 114 than anything, but it's not worth the money.
For me, while it's fun to try these things out (they're cheap -- under $10 each), as another poster mentioned above, I'll stick with the Lutens.
