Fate Man – exotic and majestic and luxuriously complex

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“So what’s your favourite Amouage fragrance?” he asked.

Tough question.

I was sipping a drink, sampling scents and chatting with people at a perfume event at Niche Essence in Toronto. 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. 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 I was surrounded by Amaouge beauteousness. I was deep in a frag fog when a tall, well-dressed, great-smelling man came up beside me and asked, “So what’s your favourite Amouage fragrance?”  “Fate Man," I said. “Oh,” he said, “that’s what I’m wearing tonight. I love the deep complexity of it.” We smiled and  discussed our favorite fragrances 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 the smell of it. 

Check out Fate Man in our Shop.