Les Mystères

A dose of sweet fig, fresh leaves and fruit mixed with smooth amber notes. To my nose, the most prominent note is fig, and it reminds me an Italian soap bar I recently purchased. Which is to say, it has a fresh smoothness—almost like fig leaves dipped in milk. That’s not to say I detect a lactic note, but just that the overall composition is seamless, soft and pleasing, as lactic notes often are. Maybe the amber notes play a role here. This fragrance is absolutely lovely but I do not associate it with mysterious allure, or esoteric beauty, or existential wonder, as I do other gorgeous (and more aptly named) Alkemia fragrances including The Raven, Gothique and Arcanum. Misnomer aside, this fragrance seduces with its masterful combination of fresh sweetness and subtle warmth.

I love this perfume, and I'm not sure if the other reviewers allowed it to mature, as it seems that most applied it right out of the bottle and left a review. Obviously the perfume preforms differently on different skin, but after allowing it to mature, the major notes are fig and frankincense. The fig isn't super gourmand but more lactonic, almost like a bar of goat's milk soap. The frankincense provides a lovely darker edge to this otherwise fresh perfume, and the other minor notes serve to round it out and add some three-dimensionality. This scent is perfect for someone who wants a fresher, clean scent, but also doesn't want to smell super sweet or like a bunch of flowers, which is definitely me.

I am so glad my nose loves this scent. I was a bit put off by the reviews but upon sniffing it the first time and especially after letting the bottle marinate for a few days the scent just gets better and better. It opens up with a sweet, juicy fig and tea mingling, the tea giving it a nice splash of greeniness and freshness. After that you start to get wafts of incense and amber which become dominant after a while. I get almost no musk, a skin musk at best, which I love. It develops into this lovely warm scent that just envelops you into its unabashed coziness. It's an understatement to say that I'm in love.

The fig and tea notes feature most prominently in the opening of this one. It is more subtle than I was expecting it to be based on the notes. Definitely unisex and very sophisticated. The word that keeps coming to mind is "elegant." Musk and amber pop out gradually as it dries down. This makes me nostalgic for fall. I find the tea note in particular very tranquil and soothing--it keeps this scent from being too heavy and musky. May be one of my all-time favorites I've tried from Alkemia, right up there with Smoke & Mirrors.

This is a great concept, "A resinous opulence of aged frankincense, black figs, labdanum, dark amber, Russian tea, swirled with a trio of sensual musks." Unfortunately the frankincense overpowers everything else. There is some bitter herbaly tea, some honey-ed sweetness from what I presume is the fig, but they are so muted and exist only in the background of the perfume. There is certainly a pine-sol like note lingering around in here, but it's not over powerful nor does it ruin the perfume entirely. While it's not bad, it just doesn't meet my expectations. To be fair my sample was a couple of years old. 5.5/10

I was excited to try this one because the combination of notes sounds so interesting, but unfortunately all I smell is incense. No fig, no tea, just an onslaught of run-of-the mill cheap incense of the kind that takes me back to the boring catholic services I sometimes attended at our very ordinary village church as a child. Nothing mysterious here, in other words, and definitely not my thing - but worth a try if you're specifically looking for a churchy incense scent!

I was sitting in bed going 'I know this smell, I have this smell, what the heck is this smell?!' And It really shouldn't have taken me this long to figure it out because I literally wore it mixed with LAVs for my wedding a week ago 🤣 This is Casbah by Robert Piquet. This is a touch 'brighter/whiter' though but it is that same intoxicating incense DNA and I need a FB of this immediately. Where Casbah is priests under a church where dark things happen, this is bad nuns in a convent trying to wash away their sins. Hell this is so good I might even sell Casbah because Alkemias bottles are wayyyy prettier and much cheaper. This is the most delicious floaty thurible incense and a plain bar of soap. Maybe they tried to wash their linens too because I get something that feels like that in this. In the dry down their is a teen teeny tiny bit of milkiness that comes out after a little bit that I totally read as fig milk, it's literally like a cup of cold milk and maybe a 3 tiny hairs of toasted coconut floating on top but that is only if you really dig for it. I wonder if my brain is automatically processing this as Casbah because of my exposure to it since the notes don't really match up but I swear this is the sister to it.

Fig! Witchy fig! Reminds me a little of Blanket Fort by Nui Cobalt, but the latter has more of a dry woodsy feel. This is more like... witchy October fig, cold spooky night. Fig is really the main note I smell. If I had to guess another note it would be maybe sandalwood or an incense note. Yes – it’s frankincense, which is what I thought. Plus the tea is obvious now that I see the note! The notes alongside the fig are really well-blended, other Alkemia scents I’ve tried with frankincense haven’t been my taste (I like the note elsewhere), but it’s not standing out here. This is smoother than Blanket Fort, not dry at all, but they both are good cold weather fig scents. As it morphs I do smell the frankincense note more clearly, but I like it here, and it smells like frankincense to me. In other Alkemia scents it has had a sour tone to it (Witching Hour, Fallen Stars on Winter Solstice). I’m actually happy about this turn of events, because even though I love fig, I have Philosykos and never can justify getting a 2nd fig.

This is another that didn't work out on my skin. My first application yielded a sightly doughy vanilla that dried really fast to dry grass. I love the dry grass but the bready/doughy notes resurfaces and I had to scrub it in the end. I'm going to see if she does that grass note alone...

This smells 100% like cleaning product to me. The piney fake lemony kind you scrub wooden floors with.