Baby Boy

Notes taken Innitial spray, about a week ago: Hay and prune juice, but somehow make it sexy A basement with wood panels and a shag carpet, where a lot of fun has been had, and those smells have seeped in. I appreciated it but wasnt sure I liked it. Throughout the week, without any additional spray: I kept getting wiffs of grape with a little something extra on my jacket, clothes, and bed; Grape jolly rancher, as someone else put it, but incredibly comforting...you would never think those would be in the same sentence. 2nd spray, today: Sweet hay again Sweaty skin, stinky in the best way, like the fantasy of smelling the used underwear of someone you ravenously lust for. Sweet, tangy, animalic warmth. I had to shovel after the snowstorm today. The frequent bursts of warm sweet grapey fruitiness kept my spirits up, even through my coat, gloves, and other layers of clothes. Final thought: This fragrance grew on me. It might be challenging for some people, especially at first, but it's weirdly addicting. If you want a good scent to wear while shoveling 2 feet of snow, this is it. FINAL FINAL THOUGHT: A few months have passed and I finally decided to buy myself a full bottle. It's my current favorite.

This is a wonderfully unique perfume that lends itself well to different occasions, times of day, and moods. If you are looking for something whose primary quality is unique, Baby Boy is an excellent choice. I liked it right away. I like it on myself, on my husband, and even smelling it on my dog when it transfers to his fluffy coat (which I am often hugging). The fragrance is both innocent and animalistic, and it conjures memories of my childhood as I crawled around pretending to be a wolf.

This parfum is the reason I love peach notes in a frag Oh my my! I love all of your danger signs... The day I found it in a boutique in Stockholm turned my world boy! Its so seductive, this is how first time sex ever smells. Its teen and not teen, it’s erotic, sexy, its punk. I love love love it! It will always stays in a very special place in my soul. I found it after I smelt more than 50 aromas that day. Its one of the best scents my nose ever been on.

A common thread throughout many fragrance releases of 2024 has been nostalgia: a yearning for the irretrievable past. As Virgile of Amphora Parfum puts it nostalgia is the desire "to remember what it was like before i started to worry about running out of time." The phenomenon of nostalgia is predicated on anxiety. We mourn what has seemingly been lost in the face of what is to inevitably come. It is in baby boy (2024) that nostalgia as the loss of innocence takes form. The source material, grape juice boxes, wildflowers, and hay among others, is contrasted with the reality of one getting older. Unfortunately for me, the idyllic escapism of baby boy never paid off in terms of comfort. It feels quite claustrophobic, which I distinguish from cloying. I will be the first to say that my nose is making some personal, negative scent associations with the notes. For instance, the opening of grape juice and baby powder reads to me as fruit leather bars. I just so happened to stockpile a box of fruit leather in the first quarter of 2020. In the heart of baby boy I encounter immortelle and blue tansy. I recently became acquainted with the smell and unique hue of blue tansy via a sample of Pearfat Parfum's La Befana (2023). Upon first sniff I read the flower to be chicken noodle soup. Similarly, I've sampled Marissa Zappas' Petrichor (2021) which revealed that immortelle, to my nose at least, smells like stale table syrup. baby boy suffers the same fate. The dry-down, although hard to pin down since the entire composition is murky, almost entirely evades me. It's a hollow shell of what precedes it. It can be argued that the note of hay persists as sweet, comforting background noise, similar to an oscillating floor fan. However, the civet, despite being featured in the base, was most prominent in the opening as a layer of endearing funkiness. And now I'm left wondering: is this what it means to grow up? Is this the loss of innocence? Even if this is the hat-trick, I am not satisfied.

This smells exactly like walking into someone’s musty house with dark brown carpets and curtains and a litter box in the center of the room.

Baby Boy was the first thing I smelled from AMPHORA, and it remains my silent favorite. It is at once childishly powdery, salaciously animalic, and nostalgically sweet. Colored a deep purple, as if made of mixed up molasses, broken hearts and Pixy Stix, it sprays on like photorealistic baby powder and grape juice. Into the drydown, I get the full body of a more classical civet, married to rich, gummy-like peach. This is maybe what I wish cough syrup smelled like when I was a child, and feels uniquely easy and comforting to wear. The common denominator of almost all of Amphora’s fragrances, mentioned and unmentioned, is a sort of tactile sweatiness. Here, it serves to remove the audience strictly from childhood. Yes, I am overwhelmed by nostalgia, but I also feel the presence of a very adult kind of age-regression, almost an erotic play. While they don’t exactly smell similar, it reminds me incredibly in spirit of Universal Flowering’s Heliotrope Milkbath: a delightful little minx that straddles its wide-open legs in a skirt halfway between a night out at the symphony and a chlorinated pool tainted by urine. My own pretentious musings aside, this is an extremely versatile and rewarding perfume to wear, and has accompanied me to bed, to art openings, to work, to hookups, and everywhere in between. In many ways I think Baby Boy epitomizes the best of what independent perfumers have to offer the current hypertrophied and often bloated niche fragrance market: genuinely arresting and evocative perfumes that rest on simple combinations of deftly executed and inventive accords. There is a lot here that’s fun and inventive, but there’s also a clear sense that Virgile understands the history and bounds of perfume-making as a tradition. It may not always be by the books, but it is also at least aware of the books. It's here that perfume feels alchemical, like the casting of protective spells or the communing with memories that belong to someone else entirely. Ten out of ten no notes, one of the best fragrance releases of the last year.

Loooove this one so much, smells like making out with someone that just took a shot of rum and chased it with a grape jolly rancher. Such a seductive scent definitely gonna buy a full bottle when I can.