Douleur!2

Really enjoyed this fragrance. So different. Green cucumber, metallic accord, fresh oysters with a subduing fruit sweet note. Got melons and mangoes the ones with nice lactone notes. Love it!

Stridently bold like the old Douleur! but somewhat tamed and more balanced overall. A nice woody, creaky, slightly smoky note enriches the colorful, fairground tableau. Great fragrance art!

I've been meaning to revisit my sample of this one. Fragrantica finally adding it seems like a great excuse to try it out again. It starts out with a soapy artificial melon. It's not teeny bop sugary but it is sweet and in your face. It's meant to be noticed and turn heads as you walk by. That sweetness is balanced out by by a cold green plastic smell. Like the top notes of Room 237 but much more palatable. I imagine this is what walking into the Fey woods would smell like. Sweet and temptingly juicy, with a cold warning underneath if you're smart enough to look for it. The melon makes it lean more feminine than masculine but it's strangeness keeps it firmly in the unisex category. This is not something you wear to smell womanly and elegant or flirty and boppy. It being so sweet also makes it feel like it should be for a more younger crowd, still out there tagging walls rolling flavored blunts and drinking watermelon four lokos. Our maybe an art student who's looking to question what art is. It projects well now, at the start of winter. I would worry about it being cloying in the heat but I won't find that out for a few months. lasts all day on my skin. This fragrance is an offensive band shirt. It's a pop-art graphic t-shirt. It's a 12 foot graffiti mural that you swear wasn't there yesterday on your walk to work. It's going to be noticed and provoke. Some will love it, some will hate it, and you'll probably start an argument if you stand between those people. I enjoy it for the experience but I don't love it and I can't imagine any situation where I could possibly wear this. I might get a decant though just so I can smell it next time it creeps into my head about how weird this is.

bloody bubblegum on swollen gums. nobuyoshi araki's 'double suicide.' lost tooth caught in falciform fairy floss. from the vial, douleur!2 is cold and salty, unable to escape similarities to etat libre d'orange's infamous secretions magnifiques; but on warm skin, sweet roses bloom on blood-soaked sugar. in certain rosy compositions, i often detect jarring notes of sweetened blood, thanks to rose oxide: metallic and shiny, it's easy to register the scent as a blood accord—whether or not that's a good thing is far from objective! in douleur!2, this heady result from rose oxide is taken full advantage of, teased out and framed in sugar and seaweed, resulting in a bawdy dream of ero guro cotton candy. while sweet, metallic bubblegum dominates, the combination of warm resins with melon and cucumber creates an alluring but menacing contrast, like a mirage of a waterfall in a desert, all as mint and camphor at the top add onto the coolness. the watery notes are enveloped by a briny base of salt, but the surrounding facets make it much better than sniffing real molluscs in the flesh. douleur!2 is dissonant, yet its electric pink heart pumps with enough depth to make the stainless steel pots and pans clanking together sound like an avant-garde symphony. songs for douleur!2: on the run by all the madmen, automation by the dadacomputer, crack rock by ayesha erotica, new breath by kap bambino.

Given the dearth of reviews for this fragrance, I feel compelled to put in my two cents. Douleur!2 opens with an aquatic and ozonic blast of melon and cucumber, accompanied by a minty, camphorous accord. Following soon after are the metallic rose oxide and confectioner's sugar, toned down from the original and balanced by the nose-searing camphor. All of this is underpinned by a resinous animalic base that, stripped of the top- and mid-notes, makes for a pleasant and decidedly less challenging drydown. Happily, I do not pick up on any oyster accord. Rather than a plate of shellfish, the gustatory analogy that springs to mind is Marukawa Bear gum, accompanied by a mint julep with less Bourbon and more Gewurztraminer. Like that food and drink pairing, Douleur!2 is unabashedly avant-garde, terribly impractical, and bemusingly novel. Is this wearable? More than the original, but the answer is still "absolutely not" if you have any regard for the welfare of those around you. I respect the craft here, and sincerely hope Mr. Gardoni perseveres with a third, fourth, or however many iterations it takes to arrive at a fragrance that realizes the potential of this metallic, uncompromising rose. Meanwhile, I'm happy to suffer through the pain.