Gold I
Widian (2016)

Beautiful.

Too bad it is discontinued.

There's a kind of feculent oud profile that occupies the dubious border territory where runny cheese overlaps with diarrhoea. Why do people wear such stuff? Well, mainly because it does not literally smell of those things; like them, yes, but in the manner that a good horror film allows one to tingle with shock without suffering spirit possession or torture oneself. And also because such complex ouds usually resolve into even more intriguing things like tannery leather notes, boozy wooziness, sweetly rotting woods from the dawn of time…
This would have been quite a daring perfume in the AJ Arabia line what with its mucky oud. But bizarrely the whole thing is treated in a light and dispersive manner wrapped in pinky musks and skinny white florals. So when one has made peace with the initial jolt of the oud construct here, one almost immediately regrets it hadn't been treated with more guts. When the evolution towards leather begins after about the first 15 minutes, the whole thing gets softer than a meringue in a steam room which is a woeful fate indeed for an oud of such decadent promise. Dives to a simple musky skin scent beyond the two hour mark.