Abraaj Valour

Perhaps Amouage Interlude is so difficult a fragrance that few people dare to take the plunge and buy and use it. It certainly has personality, but is not versatile, and its nuclear sillage and projection, combined with its steep price, make it a no-no (unless you are a sheikh, a banker, or a drug dealer -I am neither!-). Well, if you feel like having something very, but VERY similar -I compared them side by side, and FW did a great job- at a fraction of the cost with a normal projection and 8-hour lasting power, here is your chance. I took it. And it was a great buy. Thumbs up to this Abraaj!

My bottle smells very little like Interlude or any other fragrance. It's a brief slug of oregano and pimento draped over transparent woods with musk and a faintly urinous/animalic note that might be some kind of synthetic civet. Unclear. Overall, not terrible and kind of fun. But not recognizable as a clone of anything and not worthy of its own space on the shelf. Edit: three months later and this improved dramatically and is now very wearable. Maybe the best of the Interlude clones (SA Shagaf Oud Abyad is the better Interlude adjacent but it isn't a clone).

This fragrance is similar to Amouage Interlude

#1232 in my "Tour de Fragrance" This is a note-for-note dupe of Amouage "Interlude Man". I put Interlude on the same level as a Tommy Bahama cologne. Mostly smells like pencil shavings to me. One of the least interesting Amouage scents, though I love the Black Iris version. I paid $45 for this and it's a good copy, but of a scent I'm not that impressed with in the first place. Paris Corner Killer Oud is as good a copy and costs half what this costs. Both this and Killer Oud are better copies than Ard Al Zafaran's "Midnight Oud" (the pimento ruins the Midnight Oud for me, and none of them are particularly oudy by the way). I've had Interlude and Midnight Oud for years, Killer Oud for a year, and never reach for any of them. It'll be the same with this. They'll all get donated to the downtown men's shelter this Christmas.

I got a decant of this hoping it would be a nice fragrance given that some YT influencers have hyped it quite a bit, but to me it smelled absolutely revolting. Just a big mess of bad smells. Maybe it is just me, but I threw away my decant and would not suggest it to anyone unfortunately.