in the bottle: Boozy and sweet; rum and sarsaparilla. An undertone of something sharp. Bizarrely, this reminds me strongly of Velvet, Centzon Totochtin, and Dracul -- yeah, all three.

on wet: Sweet, a little boozy.

drydown: Sweet warmth with a touch of creamy soap. The soap makes me think of an old soap-on-a-rope my dad got as a gift when I was a child but never used (left hanging, untouched, on the shower head to scent the whole bathroom for about 10 years). Maybe the patchouli? The warmth has a kind of spiciness to it, otherwise, it's almost impossible to describe. Just, warm. This ... this almost smells like warm skin to me. Wow. Could this be my first brush with a skin-only-better scent? But there's a hint of something sharp and a little off-putting. Damn, damn, damn. So close.

one hour later: I'm getting a warm, clean scent, like nice laundry detergent and fresh air; a "hanging the laundry on a warm summer morning" kind of scent. It's not a bad thing, but I miss the boozy-ness.

end of day: Same as "one hour later" assessment.

compared to official description: It's hard to tell what's going on here. The leather, musk, and/or gunpowder may be conveying the warmth, but I can't pick any of them out of the mix so it's difficult to determine how they're contributing. Or maybe the gunpowder was the unpleasant sharpness (that seems unlikely as I like the smell of burned gunpowder). I'm not familiar with aquatics in general, so maybe it's the "salt air" and "ocean mist" that were off-putting to me.

notes: This is a really tough scent for me to pick apart; most of it I like very much, but it has an element that I find disagreeable right up to the point where all the elements I really like morph completely, at which point the off-scent fades too, but I'm left with fresh air and laundry detergent. Bummer.

added to forum reviews