Café Ambre Noir
Sultan Pasha (2013)

Impeccable. For fans of coffee-based gourmands, this is really a must-try. After a (brief) hit of pure coffee, there comes wave after wave of delicious amber, vanilla, and chocolate. It is somewhat similar to Amber Chocolate by La Via del Profumo.

Agree with almost everything said about this in the other reviews. It is going towards gourmand, but never actually gets there like other fragrances that feature coffee, vanilla, chocolate, spices and such. The Oud and other notes keep it perfectly from being to sweet/foody/etc. Smelled many SP offerings, and this one is top 3 for me! I haven't quite figured out how far and long it actually projects, but it stays on me forever, and stays on strong! I get constant whiffs for 12+ hours.

This one smells just wonderful and I really like it. It's a crowd pleasing comfort scent that's sweet but never too sweet or cloying.

It opens up with coffee and rum and reminds me of a coffee lacquer which is soon joined by cocoa, amber, vanilla. It smells like one of those coffee deserts that has a alcoholic rum added to it. After a hour the alcoholic rum fades and you are left with dry cocoa and exotic spices. A beautiful nose pleasing scent that would be great in the winter or the fall.

Now the projection does seem to be a bit more subtle than his usual attar's. I have noticed that some seem to project more than others. One tip with these attar's if you want more ooommmph in the projection department. After your usual application if you add a little bit of oil to your finger tip and apply it to the collarbone front and centre below the chin you will get that extra oommph.

Big thumbs up with this one and one that is full bottle worthy imo if you like crowd pleasing sweet notes of ambre, coffee, vanilla, cocoa.

another wonderful creation by the exalted Sultan...I get coffee...warm , rich , strong coffee with vanilla/chocolate flavoring...to my nose , the other 2 prominent players are oud and patch...all the other notes , as in pretty much all of Sultan's creations , come and go throughout the life of the fragrance creating various accents and nuances...and again, like all of the Sultan's potions that I've tried , this is a pleasure to sniff and wear...just the right balance of sweet without going into gourmand land...one of my favorites...

To me this opens like a honey and toffee infused Kahlúa. It's very boozy, nutty, vanillic, ambery and maintains a semi-sweet chocolate after-affect that follows the scent wherever it may go. The labdanum here is fairly strong coming from underneath the layers of sweet, nutty, boozy coffee, whose affects are quite strong here, and though coffee does come through loud and clear as a strong backbone to this fragrance, it nevertheless comes across as an alcoholic desert drink rather than a straightforward coffee beverage - it's a decadent gourmand rather than the coffee grounds opening of Cafe Tuberosa, or the dense 'dark' note in Arquiste's Nanban.

There are variations in the dense nectar that is Cafe Ambre Noir, such as a salty facet coming from the ambergris, a slight dark nutty/woodiness coming from the hindi oudh, from the beeswax occasionally there is a (excuse the term) waxy quality which is usually sharper and 'cool' when coming from notes like orris, but here combined with the sweetness from the honey it instead comes across like a candied exterior to the fragrance as a whole.

Rarely there is still another facet which seems to come from the Hyrax which adds a 'musky' or slightly earthy feeling to the fragrance, but it never becomes predominate nor fully fleshed out - and is fleeting at the edges of the fragrance.

The drydown of this fragrance primarily comes with a sugary, woody effect from the coffee drying atop the oud, combined with the labdanum, vanilla and amber which all hide together under a small amount of smokiness, which overall reminds me of a few other sweetened oud fragrances I have smelled before, and yet despite that CAN never feels cloying as I recall the others smelling, instead always simply maintaining a 'rich' and, as said before, decadent feeling which has the maturity of an adult beverage, rather than the bombastic, sharp, and immature feeling of adolescent sweets.

8/10

YT: Jess AndWesH

When it comes to coffee, my second job ever was working at a coffeehouse in the early 1990's before Starbucks went bonkers on every other street corner. We had some of the best coffees ever; so many varieties and just walking into the store itself was a treat, especially for others apparently because I would often get asked what was brewing and I'd tell them I was just concocting various blends (we had a lot of naturally flavored coffee, too, with real coconut flakes and such that was ground up.)

Probably my favorite job ever - but anyway, coffee holds a dear place in my heart and I believe I was the first one here who received Pure Coffee before its release and honestly felt like, well, where's the coffee? I'm happy to say there's coffee in Café Ambre Noir and it's not the scorched variety from Starbucks. It's almost coffee-liquor like, but then the other notes come in and give it a nice creaminess; I'm a big fan of labdanum and I could sense it here along with chocolate notes and some vanilla (tonka, if I remember reading correctly.) I don't want to say latte-like, but it definitely has a warm, creamy vibe to it while retaining just the right amount of grinds-like bitterness while getting a bit woody and darker in the later hours (maybe even a tad, dare I say, animalic.) The whole thing conjures up pleasant memories of working in that coffeehouse, popping chocolate covered espresso beans into my mouth, making cafe-mochas and eating snickerdoodle cheesecakes... sigh, the carefree days (the chain was in New York, Nancy's Cafe/Nancy's Coffee Collection and I'm not sure they even exist anymore).

This is definitely one I will be looking to invest in down the road come fall - with temperatures warming up, I've noticed my spring/summer stuff needs desperate replenishing at the moment so colder weather fragrances are going on the back burner for now, but hopefully Sultan Pasha will still be brewing a pot of this nectar come fall. I look forward to wearing it on a cool, autumn day in the cabin in the Adirondacks while brewing coffee on a percolator and watching the sun rise over the lake down below.