Aqaba Classic

This is a lovely classic perfume. I say "classic" because it is neither "modern mall frag" in temperament, nor is it "indie/niche--2017" in feel. This give off a classic vibe like a vintage Shalimar, or Coco, or similar spicy fragrance. The one predominant note on me is a "trick" perhaps due to the cardamom, clove, cinnamon (the latter which I just do not recognize)--carnation. It has the lightly sweet, slightly floral and very spicy aspect of it which I think is different and quite like. The rose may also be contributing to that "trick element" in that these are spicy roses (think Serge Lutens La Fille de Berlin or even his Vitriol). So it doesn't register entirely as rose per se. The cardamom and clove is lovely and well balanced, and the woods and peach add a warm non-gourmet sweetness that I adore, but, I also am a big fan of Coco Chanel and Kenzo Elephant, both of which have those predominant notes. It does have a powder note at the base. If you like spicy, sultry fragrances with a more formal, gentle low-key aspect (hint of powder) this may be up your alley. It's not as "roaring" as the Elephant (so fantastic) and not as peachy-sweet as Coco, and it's different in its own way. For those of you...eschewing "old lady" fragrances (as they are derisively called)-- please do. This is not for the candy-flossers, floral-aqautics, Febreze air-freshener, and the Tide Dryer Sheet lovers of white musks et al. It doesn't necessarily conjure up desert vistas for me with waving palms and galloping Arabian horses, but rather a vintage, interesting and mysterious but at the same time, elegant warm feel, a scent that yes indeed would last the ages--one you might find upon entering a lovely old house on the cape, one with warm woods from around the world, lovely old Persian rugs from Isfahan, oiled table tops, a vase of flowers (Roses? Chrysanthemums and Dianthus?) gleaming off the surface.

This stuff is fabulous. Beware that for some reason the cap on the bottle is very heavy and as the bottle ages the sprayer nozzle can stick to the inside of the cap when you pull it off. And the juice in the sprayer nozzle is sticky, so getting the nozzle off and back onto the bottle can be a problem. I just got mine loosened for the first time in maybe 10 years and I'm luxuriating in the magic of this fragrance. I bought Aqaba in around 2002 and there wasn't that much of it around at the time. So I feel badly reviewing something that could be really hard to find. But so worth trying to find it. I think at the time there may have been a website associated with this perfume house, maybe under the name Miriam Mirani, but I could be wrong about that. 18+- years later, who knows. (next day edit: I looked and Miriam Mirani does have a current website and has lots more perfumes than she had when I bought this one.) Aqaba is an upscale Middle Eastern scent. Rich and opulent, and full of roses and cloves. It's only similarity to YSL Opium is that both are rich heavy scents with some rose in them. They smell entirely different. Aqaba is spicier than Opium and has far more incense. Lasts 7+ hours on my skin and has sillage into the next county. Heady. Love it.

(This review is for Eau de Perfume) AQABA is a beautiful rich oriental scent with the lavish rose, mysterious frankincense, sultry spices and sweetness that add silky finish to the composition. This strong, spicy sweet and complex but smooth fragrance is simply gorgeous. I want to inhale it over and over and over! The opening is amazing with heady sweet spicy rose, peach aroma and tea leaves mixed with the heavy dose of spices. The mysterious incense scent wraps around the top notes making the composition complex and sultry. The heart notes are spicy sweet roses and jasmine. They express the beauty of oriental perfume amazingly well. The incense is quite noticeable in the heart notes. The base notes are more subtle with cedarwood, incense and peach sweetness. The scent evokes images of travelling through the desert to a lavish Arabian Palace centuries ago. It is like reading stories from 1001 nights and dreaming about the adventures and forbidden love that could never be. This Arabian beauty was definitely worthy to be added to my collection. I bought the full bottle after finishing my sample. The sillage is phenomenal. The longevity is 10 hours or more. The scent is powerful but not overpowering. I find it quite wearable even in the daytime.

Great perfumes and great customer service. I've never before experienced the level of customer service I have received from Miriam Mirani. Aqaba and its cousins are great perfumes, so I wanted to purchase a bottle for my sister's birthday. My sister has been going through some tough things lately, but I foolishly left the purchase to the last minute. I wrote customer service to request if they could possibly get the perfume out ASAP, and I received such kind emails back from the owner of the company, Miriam Mirani herself. She not only rushed the perfume out so it arrived in time, she included free gifts with the order, and a handwritten note to my sister expressing best wishes for her birthday and the coming year. This is a great company. I am a customer for life. Try the adorable sample set to experience all the fragrances if you don't already have a favorite, and don't hesitate to purchase a large bottle. These are perfumes made like perfumes used to be made: rich and well-blended, and made with a lot of love.

This is wonderful. My nose usually is not friendly with clove and clove is definetely a big part of Aqaba classic, but somehow it all together makes me all dreamy and in love. It's extremely feminine, sensual and warm. I can easily imagine this to be worn by Cleopatra or any other ancient time femme fatales. By this I don't want to say it's "old" or "dated", it just has this quality that makes me think of rich ancient times. I can feel wonderful cinnamon with powdery peach, sweetness of jasmin and marvelous rose and I can't stop sniffing my wrist. It has an amazing quality as any Aqaba fragrance and it's something every oriental rose lover should try, because this is....special.

I've had my eye on this one for a while and finally found a bottle on ebay. I'm so happy to finally have this in my collection! At first I smell olibanum and roses, but they are soon joined by peach, cloves, jasmine, cinnamon and cardamom. This is a warm and passionate perfume, perfect for anyone who enjoys heavy orientals like Opium or Cinnabar. The drydown actually reminds me of Teatro alla Scala.

A very unlikely love for me - peach from the onset, jumping right into the jasmine to please my white flower urges & cradling the senses in a luxurious mix of cedar, incense & oakmoss. The constant is a beautiful rose that captures the sense of elegant style and warm candel-lit evenings. Disliking the bottle, I can see past the uncreative shape or bland color to merely revel in its contents.

This scent is rich, wafting, and complex. I love potent, evocative perfume and this fits the bill. It's well-balanced, very rounded, and not overly sweet on me, with an interesting mintlike undertone (which may be a combination of the clove and tea notes).

Mysterious, alluring, powerful. It comes alive on skin and becomes intimate, sensuous, and spellbinding. Definitely a "night" fragrance!

AQABA Classic has been my signature scent now for years. I travel the world and I think every cab driver in all these countries has, upon inquiring what smells so wonderful, a little paper with the word AQABA on it to bring home to their wives and girlfriends. As well as fellow travelers and hotel personal. My friends at home I don't tell. I want to keep this my own beautiful secret. Thank you AQABA for helping making my world so special and lovely!

un classico orientale assai simile ad opium prima della riformulazione, racchiude in sè sentori legnosi, resinosi e floreali in una combinazione in cui nessuna delle note citate nella piramide è per me rintracciabile. una sintesi molto riuscita, ispirata alla regina di saba, che però a me risulta un po' old fashioned. buono.

Interesting. Very conservative. Rather heavy cigar tobacco and incense notes on top of sweet floral base. A disappointing generic flowery finish.

My mom buys more air "fresheners" than anyone I know. She places them all over her house. Their artificial, cloying, scent makes me gag, you just can't get away from them. My first impression of this perfume is sweet home air freshener with some complexity. It has that same cloying, sweet, generic floral-fruity feel. As if someone were burning a Yankee Candle and a guest came in wearing a nice, spicy perfume, this is culmination of the two. If it's longevity you are after, it took several washes to remove this scent from my fingers when I accidentally spilled it on them.

This smells identical to a box of "scented" votive candles--no particular scent, just that synthetic floral, paraben, waxy, common candle scent. Like one of those plastic boxes that are 10 votives for $3. Kind of amazing any perfumer could (or would want to) duplicate that smell so perfectly. It's not something I want on my body. It also smells very dated to me, not vintage so as to be able to fit into the modern day in a stylish way, but old-fashioned and out of place. I love clove, but this isn't going to work.

I don't know if it's because this sample has been in my keeping for over a year and turned weird, but this now reminds me of a spicier Bvlgari Femme. The fact remains that one year later, I still don't like this fragrance. It's too floral and sweet and old fashioned for my taste. There's a note underneath, I think it's the peach, that actually makes it a scrubber for me. I'll pass.

For me it mainly smells of vanilla. Which is not even listed in the notes. Very cheap and smells poor. Not seductive oriental as you would perhaps expect from the name. Not forth bothering about. Dissapointing.

Absolutely feminine and old-fashioned. Not too original but equally enjoyable.

AQABA Classic is so underrated - let me tell you all about this delicious gem! First, to those that compare it to YSL Opium...I think AQABA Classic is a fresher, younger, sexier cousin of it. This opens with a very warm, spiced, rosey scent. I'm not big fan of "traditional" wet rose in fragrances. But these are no ordinary rose notes. The Bulgarian and Taif rose are exotic and seductive. The rosey parts settle down soon after and the incense, tea, & cinnamon start to pull you in. My goodness this is really truly lovely. Layers and layers of elements meld so nicely on the skin. I feel that Aqaba is giving my skin a big hug and a wink - she knows what she is doing. She is seductive yet comforting. She is exotic yet familiar. She is showcasing some of the best scents the Middle East has to offer. The sillage is wild! It's not very loud but it lasts alll dayyy. So worth the price point. I hate perfumes that just disappear or at best become a skinscent. I would recommend this for anyone that enjoys warm spices and incense in fragrances. I would say the following are distant cousins of AQABA Classic: Givenchy Organza, Lancôme Magnifique, Armani Code, & Dior Addict. If you love any of those, I would encourage you to give this a try and enjoy its warm magic! Big round of applause to Miriam Mirani for collaborating with my favorite nose: Thierry Wasser!

An aromatic Oriental fragrance of beauty and dignity. This smells luxurious and Persian very much like the perfumeries in Dubai. And they have some good stuff trust me. On me this is a huge rose-incense combination that I have come to enjoy so much and experienced often in other fragrances. This has two rose notes: Bulgarian rose and Rose de Taif. Both are very strong and perfumy but they are not your typical sweet roses. They are very spicy and aromatic. They have been layered with spices, with ginger, with cardamom, with cinnamon and with a puff of smoky incense. There is a tea note too and it's very noticeable, herbal, green, like a really good strong jasmine tea. There is also a jasmine in this and it's of the deeper darker jasmines though not indolic. The incense is what takes over the scent throughout the final phase. I could smell the olibanum which is in itself an incense. The woodsy dry down is also very pronounced. Easily unisex. Very bold nocturnal and very sultry. Smells luxurious and great for a formal special occasion, not romantic but still glamorous and elegant.

I smelled this perfume many time in the past and now I'm trying to track it back somewhere again because I would like to smell it again before buying. Tastes may change. It is very intense, almost dense and utterly beautiful oriental. It smells like a bit of everything in the beginning as if the perfumer couldn't really decide what to put inside and just put everything for good measure. After a while on skin it blend with your skin chemistry and the result is very personal but always deeply oriental, spicy with style and also floral, especially rose. A great fragrance with a great staying power. A little goes a long time and with good sillage. Just try it before buying because you really need to like Middle Eastern type of fragrance to enjoy this gem.

Aqaba smells almost like the old Opium which has been gone for some time. Really striking similarity to my old perfume flame...I am falling in love again. The happy ending is that I now own 100ml of this beautiful oriental perfume and I love it so much. Definitely for fans of Cinnabar, Youth Dew and Opium. Spicy, orangy, smoky with very good sillage and longevity. Who would have thought this scent was created by Guerlain ́s current perfume master ? The scent was very expensive here in Germany (170 Euro) but I do not regret that I bought it. It ́s a time machine back into my old Opium days.

this fragrance is one of the most beutiful and precious fragrances in my collection. it is very intensive, very spicy and aromatic. the cloves and cinnamon dominate in the composition, rounded by the frankincense. altho intense, this fragrance is not heavy, but has some kind of spicy freshness. with the development it becomes softer and sweeter. it is amazingly long lasting. te bottle is anciently elegant, and the top is suprisingly heavy. i love the draw-string pouch it reminds me of middle east jewelry.

Hubby just gave me this and I am so happy. It's my kind of scent and I have been lusting after it for a long time. What I like about it is that it can be worn in hotter weather (not that I bother about what kind of scent to wear when). We just came back from San Antonio, TX, where it was warm and humid. Every time I wore this I got so many compliments. Love it!

Oh man...I was looking for a heavy, strong, spicy Oriental for my new identity as an Older Woman. Got the sample, loved it, dropped $85, wore it every day for a week and now I CANNOT STAND IT! It's like an incessant, unchanging, irritating background noise...like a distant car alarm. I may be older, but I haven't changed THAT much...back to Chanel No. 19!

This reminds me of a head shop. Lots of 1970s vibe going on here: spices, rose and incense. I don’t pick up the peach note. I can understand the love.... and the dislike as I have experienced both emotions wearing this perfume. On a good day it smells exotic, and on other days it smells like a cheap candle. Still I find it oddly attractive.

when i was in highschool i went to paris & visited notre dame. this scent reminds me of the smell of the candles my friend and i got from inside the church. it's kind of a waxy, honey, inscense kinda smell. i like the scent but i don't want to wear it as a perfume.

This is my favorite of Aqaba! Like heat in the noon, in desert. With wonderful softness of cinnamon and balmy sweet woods... Light weightless like fume of incense in the women's half of the palace ;o))

The Aqaba website gives the following fragrance notes: Peach Tea Leaves Egyptian Jasmine Bulgarian Rose Damask Rose Cinnamon Cloves Cardamom Frankincense White Cedar Wood Oakmoss Sounds lovely!

An old-fashioned oriental scent. Very strong, woody and spicy. Maximum silage and fair longevity.