Amber Mandarin

Very nice and natural scent but stays for around 10 minute

Amber Mandarin is the third fragrance in the 4711 Collection Absolue Discovery Set and on paper, I saw quite a few interesting notes for me in this. I'm a big fan of Cardamom, I like christmas-treat-like scents, I enjoy citrus openings, I like pepper... but I do have my problems with powdery Irises and I'm not a fan of lipsticky-sweetness. And I found all that in the perfume. This very much confirmed everything I thought about my own tastes but ended up very much as a fragrance I was disappointed in. In it's opening, it's a bit like ELdO's Remarkable People - one of my favorite comfort scents. Tarty Citrusses, Cardamom-Patchouli sweetness, warm amber, spicy pepper. Spiced up Christmas Treats and Tangerine. Some slight vanilla in the background. Sweet, but not cloying, with the citrusses easing up what can otherwise become too much. For the first 15 minutes, I thought this was something I was going to enjoy a lot. Then the Iris hit. And took over. If you've read other reviews of mine, you know I have my problems with dry-powdery Iris. And while I acknowledge that this is a very subjective experience, I still feel Amber Mandarin took a turn for the worse over the next hour or so. Because while the opening was very enjoyable to me, it was nothing more than that: an opening. All that made it enjoyable to me faded rather quickly. The Cardamom lasted the longest but even that went away and what remained was an abstract, powdery, lipsticky sweetness that I've found again and again in too many perfumes to be able to enjoy. It was accentuated by the pepper note that remained but the only thing I could think of was "I'm sure there's a Spicebomb like this"... and I don't think that's a particularly great compliment. In fact, thinking about it now, at this stage my mind must have gone to the sample of Spicebomb Infrared EdP that I recently got a random sample of and the comparison makes a lot of sense. That, too, was abstract lipsticky sweetness plus a lot of pepper. Amber Mandarin was a little less on the sharpness but still. The idea very much is the same. And what I didn't like in the SB, I did not like here either. It felt, at this point, cheap, artificial and plasticky to my nose. And after about 5 hours, all that remained was a faint, abstract sweetness. Of all the 4711 Collection Absolue I tried so far, this was the most disappointing one because it started so nice and went generic so quickly. Again, I have to acknowledge that I just don't deal well with Iris and that's just my taste, but I feel everything that might have made Amber Mandarin special lasted for half an hour and then there was just not much left. Which is just sad.

I dont care how they smell , Ill buy them for the bottles alone !