Freeway

the notes listed here are entirely different than the notes listed on sarah’s website... i’m assuming that they’ve reformulated it since it was first released. the correct notes: Top Notes: orange groves and gasoline Heart Notes: jasmine, lilies, palm flowers Base Notes: hot tyres, waffles with ice cream. the description on her website is different too.. i’ll insert an excerpt of that below. “We [sarah mccartney & luckyscent] started thinking about the scent of LA in the future. It's the aroma of a freeway when the oil has run out, and the space has become a wildlife haven, with orange groves and white flowers. There are solar cars and bicycles, picnic tables and humming birds. Like everywhere in LA there's the background scent of cooking sugar. Mandarin petitgrain essential oil gives it a strange note of gasoline evaporating from sun on baking concrete, and there's the deep dark hot rubber smell in the background.” someone's probably noted this already but anyway, i think this is an absolutely great perfume. excellent concept, excellent execution. it can’t be categorized.. it’s just its own thing. it sounds as though it would be a bit challenging, but it’s very wearable.. not at all offputting. it is indeed a little strange, but nothing crazy. i was actually a bit dismayed by how nice and comforting it smelt when i first got it.. was expecting something more dystopian and abstract. a creamy orange aroma stays from opening to fade, and is accompanied by peculiar notes of hot rubber and sugary pastry. the gasoline note is more prominent in the opening, but it’s fleeting. very fun fragrance, and it is entirely genderless. i also think it’s suitable to wear no matter the weather outside.

In crafting 4160 Tuesdays Freeway, Sarah McCartney does something very special: she works in a generally sweet, creamy, pleasant formula and turns in partly dirty to create something brand new and nuanced. The dominant aspect of the risk is the trifecta of orange blossom, vanilla, and petitgrain, and the former two are used to make up the near-entirety of two other compositions that I love, the more purely sweet Profumum Meringa and Lili Bermuda SunKiss. Certainly there are plenty other such examples, as well. Freeway, however, takes a bit of a turn (pardon the pun) toward the boozy and the dirty, combining the abovementioned trio with, respectively, rum/brandy and tobacco/cannabis. It's this harmony between the mostly-sweet notes and the somewhat dirty notes that fosters a certain uniqueness that distinguishes Freeway from other sweet orange blossom scents. Sarah McCartney's mastery is best on display here as it is in Eau My Soul, finding the right combination of notes in proper proportions to create art. Performance is strong and Freeway should prove a versatile offering, serving for me as a mostly-refreshing distraction on a hot summer day, though it's also bold, sweet, boozy, and dirty, so it really works year-round. Regardless of wearer or occasion, this is something I'd like to smell over and over again. $110 for 50ml is more or less typical of her pricing, perhaps slightly higher than average for an EDP, but nevertheless worth every penny for a fan like me. Her best work to date (that I've tried) along with Eau My Soul. 9 out of 10

My first experience of Freeway, a few years ago, was not good: I received a bottle for Christmas, and first wore it on a freezing, icy January day. Though I really liked the sweet (not overly so), vanilla and orange blossom fragrance, it just didn't work in cold weather, I have revisited it with a new bottle during the the heatwaves we've been having in the UK during the last few weeks, and it has been amazing: As it comes out of the bottle, it reminds me of a more modern take on traditional eaux de Cologne, such as 4711 and Imperiale; without including nasty white musks like Guerlain's Cologne Du Parfumier or some of the newer 4711 floral Colognes. The citrus notes gradually fade, and the orange blossom and vanilla take over. The more I have worn it, the less I have noticed the hot road, tyre and petrol notes, and am smelling the floral, alcoholic and powdery notes, alongside the orange blossom and vanilla. Thankfully, I'm not smelling the cannabis, as this really doesn't work on me. I think Freeway is going to become a regular summer fragrance for me, and I am always going to remember it as the perfume I wore on my wedding day yesterday (my husband wore Goodbye Picadilly)

My first nice full bottle! (Or, at least that I bought myself). It was my signature last summer and I ran out of my decant and now that the weather is above 50 I had to get it. It was the only sweet thing I'd felt comfortable wearing in +90 degree weather, somehow it bloomed on my skin nicely in the heat. It really smells like a county fair to me. (A wearable county fair) I don't know why - it's supposed to smell like a freeway, and I can't recall any notes that specifically smell like a county fair - but it really reminds me of a fair, or a theme park, or a festival atmosphere. Maybe a gas station with something exciting going on.

Definitely more a sweet scent than dirty ... but there is dirtiness. When you apply it, you think 'lovely, sure, but where's that leather and rubber? The cigarettes and weed?'. Give it about 10 minutes. Sweetness goes dry, rubber meets with an acrid, sour citrus. It's not a freeway, nor a dirty L.A street ... but there's definite darkness. Yet, the vanilla persists. It's an odd blending. I actually would love to buy a full bottle of this. Its genuinely interesting. This is orange blossom and vanilla meeting with rubber and petitgrain mostly. Very fun. I enjoy it.