Image - Amouage Fate Man - luckyscent.com
“So what’s your favourite Amouage fragrance?” he asked.
Tough question.
Kay and I were sipping drinks, sampling scents and chatting with people at the VIP Premiere of Niche Essence in Toronto last Thursday. It’s an elegant store with fragrances beautifully laid out and easily accessible. The place was abuzz with people swooning over fragrances by top niche lines like MDCI (I kept drifting back to FBW Cuir Garamante),Teo Cabanel, Marly, Hors Là Monde and Amouage. Kay and I went from display to display, sniffing, spraying, reading the promo materials on each brand and each frag….and then we reached the Amouage display.
Amouage is an international luxury fragrance house that was founded in Oman 1983 by the Sultan of Oman, but really became a player when Christopher Chong was made Creative Director in 2006. Together with CEO David Crickmore, Chong reinvented and reinvigorated the line, working with great perfumers like Jean-Claude Ellena, Maurice Roucel and Jacques Flori to produce some of the richest, luxurious, most gorgeous fragrances now on the market.
So there we were, surrounded by Amaouge beauteousness. “Try this one” I’d say to Kay and hold a tester out to her. “OK, but you need try this one” she’d say and spritz me. We were deep in a frag fog when a tall, well-dressed, great-smelling man came up behind us and asked, “So what’s your favourite Amouage fragrance?” Kay thought for a moment, then answered. “I am really smitten with Beloved Woman right now.” Good choice, I thought. Beloved Woman is a beauty.
Truth is, Amouage is such a strong line, I’d be hard-pressed to find one I didn’t love. So I went with the tester I had in my hand, which happened to be my latest my latest crush and most recent Amouage purchase. “Fate Man” I said. “Oh” he said, “that’s what I’m wearing tonight. I love the deep complexity of it.” We all smiled and the three of us discussed our favorite frags a little more before moving on to smell other scents and chat with other people. Still, I would have been happy to talk about Fate Man for hours.
According to the press release, Fate Man, along with Fate Woman, complete the first cycle of the Amouage narrative, with Fate Man parodying the force and power of the inevitable. Seems like pretty heavy lifting for a frag. Still, a creative brief is a creative brief and you’ve got to start somewhere I suppose, so I’m going to start with the opening.
Fate Man opens with sweet, luscious mandarin and green, anisic absinth that together create a succulent herbal, green start that is warmed by a note of spicy, succulent ginger. It’s bracing and bright before notes of earthy, leathery saffron and pungent, bitter cumin add a hum of animalic sweat in the background. And while the spices stay in the background, they do add a potency and a rich complexity to Fate Man. As I blooms, gorgeous, rich, curry-laced immortelle, or everlasting flower, comes forward paired with a lush note of rose that soften the opening and give the fragrance a lovely floral dimension. Sweet, woody frankincense surrounds the flowers, its balsamic aspect amplified by woodsy, balsamic copahu and camphourous lavandin. The woodiness is extended to the base with cedarwood and sandalwood, while a leathery, ambery labdanum adds depth and marks it ‘oriental’. A note of anisic licorice echoes the absinth at the opening, while Tonka bean offsets any bitterness. Musk mellows out any harshness.
The drydown is exotic, majestic and luxuriously complex – notes echo and hide, push and support yet it never smells cluttered or unbalanced. Does that mean that it succeeds in parodying the force and power of the inevitable? I don’t know about that, but looking back on it now, I see that it was inevitable that I would love wearing it – even though it’s labeled Fate Man - from the first sniff.
Fate Man is listed in our Decant Store. Decants are $5.00.