A Flame In Your Heart

First wearing of 4160 Tuesdays – A Flame in Your Heart, a fragrance I’d not heard of until relatively recently, a spicy, resinous, potential gem with healthy does of labdanum and benzoin at the center, along with styrax and cistus, accented by pink pepper, cocoa, rose, and kumquat, though I really would not have put together the supporting notes on my own, not by a long shot. It’s primarily an elegant yet robust resin-led experience, not dense to the point of being prohibitively wintery or animalic, but rather, a smoky, semi-sweet, beeswax-esque expression of resins that’s really a pleasant experience, both for fans of resinous fragrances like me but also for those who are new to genre, it’s accessible but nuanced. It's priced $235/145 for 100/50ml in EDP concentration, sold in the US via great boutiques like Perfumology, and it performs outstandingly. It’s immediately one of my favorite discoveries from the house recently, and I think I’ll need a full bottle at some point. 8 out of 10

This smells 100% like the incense they burned in the Catholic church I attended as a child. I'm no longer religious, but I always ADORED the smell of the incense, and I have been searching for a wearable version of this scent for years. I've lost count of how many incensey perfumes I have sampled, a lot of lovely ones but nothing quite hit the mark. This sample actually came to me for free along with a full bottle purchase of 4160 Tuesday's Waft From the Loft (another casualty of my quest for church incense). I didn't choose it, I wasn't looking for it, and wasn't expecting anything from it. But when I tried it, BOOM - there it was, the smell I had been questing for. Amazing!! Now to diligently start saving my cash (cause this baby don't come cheap)

Cistus Incanus is apparently the rock plant used to produced labdanum but I was curious as to why it's listed separately.. The resinous, balsamic notes are definitely present but there's also a bright green citrus op note which apparently comes from the leaves. This combines with the sharp orange of kumquat peel and is wonderfully zingy but initially threatens to disappear as quickly as it appears as the heavier amber resins come through but surprisingly, after a few more minutes, the two find an equalibrium and meld into a coherent whole. The result of this is a fragrance that becomes a a soft , warm ,almost orangey, amber. A cosy, marmalade of a scent.

Oh HELLO. This is a spicy, woody amber which blew my socks off on first spray. It reminds me of a ‘sexy’ body spray I had as a teen (I was very try-hard) and I’ve never smelled anything like it since. It’s quite linear and fades down to a small sillage relatively quickly, but I want more of it, all the time. This is low-level, spicy self-confidence in a bottle. None of that floral delicacy, just pure intimate sexy spice and I BLOODY LOVE IT.

Got a sample of this last week, and holy crap!!! it's an amazing substitute for Tom Ford Sahara Noir, albeit a bit lighter in sillage, and a wee bit less incense-y, but fabulous nonetheless ❤️ Might actually buy a full bottle of this, to save me having to use my prized bottle of TFSN 😆