Ocean Rain

This is one of the most surprising, wonderful and uniquely fresh colognes I have tried. I get a sweet, subtle & fresh floral and herbs notes juxtaposed to a dry airy oakmoss throughout. The green notes of the fragrance are very wet as are the floral notes. The diorella'esque over ripe melon note is positioned expertly in the composition. I also get some of the seaside saltiness as it dries - as well as a clean plastic freshness that creeps in about an hour into it. It brings to mind a Mediterranean seaside garden full of just open fresh flowers, damp lavender, healthy herb plants in terracotta pots - but not overpowering - very complimentary to the rest of the composition. That push-pull Lovingthealien mentioned is a wonderful description. It's wet then kinda dry then wet again. Like a drop of water on dry earth before it gets absorbed. A strange contradiction but it reinforces the natural notes in the fragrance beautifully. This cologne is fresh and it is very clean without overplaying any citrus or water notes. As a matter of fact this is one of those rare colognes that doesn't depend on heavy citrus openings for freshness. The citrus is elusive in this one and only acts in support of the heavier floral notes. This fragrance is all about complimentary notes. There are no notes that stand out dramatically. It is a collage of notes where the overall composition is beautiful because the notes are so thoroughly mixed and incorporated. The individual notes are so well mixed that they lose their individual character and create new scent experiences. Very much like mixing colors like blue and yellow in order to get a beautiful unique green. It's a lightly masculine scent and the floral and wet melon notes are what really give it a clear freshness and unique character. I've been looking for a clean, smooth masculine slightly bitter floral & fresh cologne for a long time. Today I can say I have finally found it. So surprisingly wonderful, I just bought another bottle which I have never done before. Would recommend this for purchase by anyone who appreciates unique fragrances. All that said the most mysterious thing about this fragrance is that it is now discontinued. With something as beautiful as this - it is only fitting and adds to it's other worldly poetry. Fragrance Stages: Top Notes : Fresh Salt Water, Melon, Lily of the Valley Mid Notes : Floral, Melon, aldehyde, salt water Drydown : Dry - Powdery, floral, salt water, herbs, terracotta pots

Ocean rain by the precious house of mario Valentino is a complex, challenging and quite artistic blend. It doesnt smell acquatic or ozonic, it is a flowery composition with soft notes of fruits, in particolar melon. It reminds me a forest next to the sea after a night rain, maybe in the late spring. So it is bit dark, not very sunshiny, and needs time to be appreciated. More 70's than 90's, it is very unique, hard to compare to another fragrance. It is in the category of 900 aramis or azzaro acteur and maybe Hermes equipage, because of the flowery smell but they are not identical. The quality inside the juice is clear, the only downside can be the versatility because it's not an easy scent and i dont know the exact occasion to wear it. Definitely for mature crowd, spring and fall. Good performance as well. i found Ocean rain in a store for nothing, so im Happy to have it in my collection. Profumo un po' retrò, composizione floreale complessa e affascinante. Non per tutti, qualità innegabile. Scent-8, 5 Longevity-8 Sillage-7 Versatility-6 Uniqueness-9 Presentation-8 Backup bottle? No Compliment factor-6 My vote-8 In one word- complex Alternative- aramis 900, azzaro acteur.(same category not same smell).

Ocean Rain is just gorgeous. Edmond Roudnitska bowed out with a real treasure in this languorous floral. The marine notes are so far removed from any contrived notion derived from Cool Water and the like. Here, the citrus isn't screechy, but rather, the ripe rose, waxy cyclamen and other flowers (lily of the valley and ylang ylang are definitely here, though not listed in the notes breakdown) exalt the composition and meld with the subtly saline accents. As it dries in the heart, there are melons, cucumber, and tree resins. The oakmoss that eventually moves to the forefront, is salty, reminiscent of kelp, and an earthy cedar is the backbone of the whole composition. This somehow reminds me of walking on the Marginal Way in Ogunquit, Maine on a cool damp day, shortly following rainfall. The salty air and ocean spray, dew-dappled garden blooms, rugose roses, herbs, conifers and wildflowers that grow along the path... I am at a loss at what else to say. Beyond words. 10/10

E' angoscioso leggere da gente che si nutre di roba sintetica moderna, che questo profumo era tutto sintetico e a buon mercato. Nel 90 non esisteva questo morbo degli aromachemicals, non esisteva l'unione europea con tutte le sue regole demenziali fatte per portare al fallimento la profumeria europea e arrivare a sostituire tutto il naturale delizioso con questa valanga di spazzatura sintetica odierna.. Ocean rain dava una sensazione di malinconica giornata sul mare, cielo grigio e aria umida.. Una vaga sensazione paludosa di alghe marine e erba,ma tutto silenzioso, fermo... A me piace molto, è sicuramente molto migliore di tutto quel ciarpame che oggi riempie gli scaffali delle profumerie,con le vaniglie tossiche e finte e il nauseanche oudh sintetico firmenich dozzinale e abusato.

Picture a bouquet of pungent flowers drying out in a dim, semi-ventilated cabin on an old wooden ship under sail in a heavy salt spray. Alternatively: very old soap but so well preserved and of such high quality that, to your astonishment, florals of an intoxicating sharpness bloom outward when you open the wood box. Ocean Rain doesn't quite remind me of what the name evokes (many other fragrances surely do) but it is definitely unique and I enjoy it greatly, especially because it gets better as it wears on the skin.

Unique and sublime. Nothing in my fragrance collection smells like this. Daring for a male fragrance. It smells like a strange and putrid mess when you first spray it on. Then it settles into a perfect rose oakmoss accord. I had Aramis 900 years ago, and I feel Ocean Rain makes Aramis 900 smell gauche and heavy handed. Anyone serious about male perfumery deserves to try Ocean Rain at least once.

A green floral citrusy rose masterpiece. Longevity over 12 h,good sillage.a more suitable version of aramis 900. I don't feel sea notes.but a paradise of rose, flowers and oakmoss.wow. 9/10

wish it was still cheaper get it b4 its gone edmond worked on this goddamn accord for 4 decades

This isn't at all what I expected. It's way better. The opening hits with a green lily-of-the-valley supported by the cool melon note of Diorella and a fascinating combo of oakmoss and sea notes (not "aquatic" notes of the 90s). The green gets stronger, and it begins to remind me a lot of Insense. And I mean a lot! The salty ocean notes get drier and the floral heart begins to emerge. The whole becomes very blended as the aromatic herbal notes come into the fore, giving the composition a richness not common in men's fragrances. The Roudnitska push/pull is present here, making the fragrance at once rich and dense yet with a sparkling subdued clarity. Salty ocean scents meet precariously with the pool-float note that lily-of-the-valley sometimes exudes to create something altogether insane and a bit cartoony. The oceanic salt and herbal powdery florals are offset by the woody notes. Weird, salty moss and cedar make their way through the other notes in the drydown. Altogether a lovely composition. You can't beat the price for a real Roudnitska creation, either!

Pretty amazing stuff. And a great bottle. It’s impossible to tell from the photo here but the style is art deco and beautifully curved. I’m not sure I want to smell of this all day but I appreciate the creativity. And what a relief from the sweet, gourmand, generic, instantly forgettable designers flooding the market. Opens with: water cress, cucumber, radish, melon, nutmeg, cinnamon and wet grass. The mid is hot concrete after rain and bitter herbs and the dry-down, the most accurate rendition of petrichor I can imagine. It won’t have your significant other swooning at your neck but if you find a bottle you’ll have Roudntiska’s final composition in your cabinet. And that’s not nothing.

Pleasant blind buy surprise. The citrus notes are very subdued. I am not sure if that is due to the age of the bottle or if it was originally composed that way. Ocean Rain comes across aromatic and green, almost in a basil like way. The leather and woods give the fragrance some body. The oakmoss and amber in the base are present but not overpowering. I do not notice sharp transitions between the top, middle, and base notes. It feels somewhat linear, but that does not mean it lacks complexity. Overall, this smells like what I imagine a rugged yet sophisticated man from the 90s would wear. They just don't make them like this anymore.

Like standing over an ocean cliff, staring into the horizon and remembering people and memories lost to times past. Soft, delicate, floral lavender musk...reminded me of Paul Sebastian Fine Cologne, only more delicate and floral. The melancholy vibes remind me of Issey Miyake L'eau Bleue, but the scent profiles are different. Bought this because Dior Eau Sauvage is in my top 3, possibly favorite, and had to get Roudnitska's last fragrance. I can appreciate it, but on my first wear, it's a like, not a love. Something I'd appreciate wearing on a quiet lonely walk lost in thought. Scent: 7 / Sillage: 7 / Longevity: 6

Wonderfully green-smelling, but not sharp. It's like a whiff of dried herbs from your pantry mixed with the smell of beach roses (roses come in a little later). Not sweet, but soft and organic.

Ocean Rain is the last perfume by Edmond Roudnitska. How should we view it? Roudnitska is known for his perfumes, for his influence on the state of the art of perfumery and, more than many other noses, for his discussion of the art of perfumery. I don’t know all his work. I’m not an historian and there has been very little critical analysis of perfumery as an art form. There isn’t much to draw on for those who would like to know more. The eternal proviso that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing comes to mind. Still, I’d like to write about Ocean Rain. Ocean Rain is nominally a floral chypre perfume made for the Italian luxury leather shoe and accessory firm of Mario Valentino. It was released in 1990. It braids ideas present in Roudnitska’s earlier works. It comments on the hygeine/human line drawn in his earlier masculine offerings Rochas Moustache and Dior Eau Sauvage. It has a chilly freshness. Where Eau Sauvage’s freshness is citric and a little tart, Ocean Rain’s is closer to antiseptic. It’s also a fruity chypre in the line of Rochas Femme and Dior Diorella but it has none of their warmth. The real predecessor to Ocean Rain is Dior Diorissimo, Roudnitska’s tribute to the lily of the valley. Even though I’ve never smelled the original Diorissimo, I’ll talk about it. Thanks to the work of Roudnitska we’ve been given some tools to discuss perfume conceptually. An important part of his legacy is the discussion of perfumery. Roudnitska saw perfumery as a place for discourse and I am grateful to him for having helped those of us who wear perfume to think and talk about it. Ocean rain has a cool, motionless tone that distances it from some of its siblings. Where Diorella and Femme focus on the warmth at the heart of a chypre and suggest body contact, Ocean rain puts a lid on things. It has a dampening tone. It acts more as a filter than a springboard. As soon as it puts forward an idea, it pulls it back almost suspiciously. What seems like a chypre’s moss, and the foot in the door to a bodily scent, freezes suddenly and appears mineral. The citrus topnote doesn’t lead to green woods and indolic flowers, the fullness of hesperidic notes that often follows the initial tartness of bergamot in a chypre. It becomes a cold breeze and leaves behind a clinical wake. Ocean Rain isn’t tentative, it is exceedingly careful. I've never quite know what to make of Ocean Rain. Roudnitska trained us to understand that at the heart of a chypre is a fundamentally devil-may-care attitude. Before anything else, a chypre is about pleasing oneself. Ocean rain reads more as restrained, grim to some. Where Diorella suggests an infinite range of color tones hiding behind each olfactory note, Ocean rain tells you that the world is a blanched sepia. Earthy olfactory tones can the suggest decay of autumn, the freshness through the muck of spring, the vegetal richness of early summer. The commonality is richness. Ocean Rain's earthiness is less optimistic in tone. It's dirt as opposed to soil. Seen as a chypre, Ocean Rain is dour. Perhaps a better lens through which to see it would be Diorissimo. Again, I know Diorissimo from descriptions of the original fragrance, through anecdotal history of its making and from the general writing of Rounitska found online--not from smelling the vintage perfume. Seeing Ocean Rain, the last perfume of a dead perfumer from the perspective of one of his great works that had effectively been hobbled by reformulation before his own death, is a bit ghoulish and essentially fictitious since it is based on so many weak links. But the history of perfume is largely the interpretation of discussions of suppositions of gossip in the first place. I’ll proceed, if cautiously. The muguet at the heart of Diorissimo is the height of synthesis and a success of abstraction as the tool of a trained mind. Roudnitska chose as his topic a fragrance he knew couldn’t be gathered botanically as the flower produces no fragrance materials that can be collected and there is no other scent in the environment that closely mimics it. He chose this target as the means by which he would show the perfumery of the time (mid-20th century) as burdened and overstuffed. He sought to create Diorissimo not only to create what nature wouldn’t surrender, he meant it to be a lesson in the conceptualization and execution of perfumery. Diorissimo is the only perfume I have found that in fact presented a manifesto. I’ve mentioned in the past that perfumery doesn’t have artistic movements, as in deliberate artistic explorations and uncovering of dogma, credos or theories pre-existing the art itself. Perfume has genres, which are really objective or subjective descriptions and classifications. Here, Diorissimo stands apart from all other perfumes. I don’t think that Ocean Rain was the artistic assertion that Diorissimo was. I simply find that the tones used to create a crisp, hygienic tone like lily-of-the-valley as the same palette that will let us take apart Ocean Rain. Ocean Rain isn’t a frigid, sociopath of a chypre, it’s simply a cold beauty. The soapy muguet in Diorissimo suggested a temperature that in Spring is cool but warming. The same temperature in Ocean Rain is simply travelling in the other direction, not halfway to summer warmth, but halfway to frozen. It’s the scent of an imaginary late-autumn-blooming fruit tree. Ocean rain smell of dirt and wood and chilled flowers. Does that seem unwelcoming? I find it enticing. from scent hurdle.com

This is a haunting fragrance, literally as though Edmond Roudnitska put a part of his heart into the formula, his parting gift to the world. Ocean Rain is an extremely synthetic perfume, likely because it was relatively inexpensive when it was released (not exactly a drugstore cheapie, but not high end, either), so vintage bottles like mine are probably in good shape with little to no spoilage. It smells like rich flowers with some indole on top, followed by a dense composition of bitter green notes, dry woods, and an incredible amber. It's essentially an olfactory impression of lying on a moist beach after a sun shower, with a distinctly grey, sandy aroma at its core, very interesting and very literal. Roudnitska achieved the sandiness using immortelle, imparting its dusty essence in a novel way. The H&R chart lists it as a fresh chypre, but I think the huge amber (a precursor to Prada Amber) and the myriad herbal and floral notes around it make Ocean Rain more of an oddball, an "aquatic oriental," if you will. This is an incredible perfume, currently going for good prices on Ebay. I highly recommend adding it to your collection if you enjoy old-school aquatics that emphasize more realistic facets of marine environments over the absurd watermelons-bobbing-in-fresh-water thing spawned by Acqua di Gio.

A friend sent this to me to check out and I’ve sprayed it on a few times now but am finally getting around to putting some words together about it. From what I understand, this is a '90s cult cheapy by Roudnitska, and so it should be probably be read in context with the aquatic wave of the time. Indeed, it’s a hedione beast with an oceanic feel. There’s some cucumber-y calone present, but it’s mercifully buried beneath soft white florals. It’s nothing like the satanic windex-fresh flanker-y stuff that emerged mid-‘90s and haunted the millennium (and still terrorizing malls to this day). Instead, this has a mossy iodine accord over benzoin base with calming green and lavender thing sitting on top. It’s made from some fairly popular aromachemicals, but Roudnitska did a very nice job of sanding down all the nasty harsh bits, and the result is a smooth ozonic floral resin affair. It’s boring, but I think it’s supposed to be that way given the somewhat pedestrian clothing line and its target audience. Thus, a really well put-together cucumbery synth jas-moss thing that feels quite “of its moment.” I picture high contrast black and white photography of some gormless waifs fawning over a surfboard and a glistening ocean. An anachronism, but one that connoisseurs will dig. Cheap as chips, too.

I did a small wrist dab kind of sampling and I can't say there is anything pleasant about this one. The animalic quality is quite strong, but doesn't last very long. For a while, it seems like a bunch of discordant notes are competing for dominance. After perhaps 45 minutes, a much less potent scent is present, a little mossy, a little ambery, a little green, etc. I'd much rather wear Nino Cerruti Pour Homme, which features a similar idea in the base with a really nice thyme note that comes to the fore. This one doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, so to speak, and I can't think of any reason to wear it instead of another fragrance that has a sense of direction but is at least somewhat similar. I think the problem here is that the notes seem to want to converge, whereas in the fragrances I enjoy the notes have a sense of separation. Due to the strong animalic note in the opening, I'm not surprised this one was discontinued. My guess is that a very small percentage of the population would have any interest in it if it were relaunched now.

I'm trying to understand Ocean Rain, Edmond Roudnitska's last creation. What was the old master trying to create? Dior Eau Sauvage is my #2 favorite fragrance of all time, and I've always wanted to try his Diorella, the "improved Eau Savauge" marketed to women, and the primary comparison of Ocean Rain. Ocean Rain has a classic feel, significantly due to the indolic florals, but which floral notes produce that? Doesn't seem to be listed here. And 1990 was just the beginning of the nascent aquatic genre. Ocean Rain opens with the indolic floral skank, and dries down with a fresh floral earthiness. The freshness is a subsumed, vaguely ozonic/aquatic one. Someone below described it as a seaside forest or flower garden after a nights rain and that's about right. But was Roudnitska incorporating nascent aquotic/ozonic elements like in the recent Aramis New West and Davidoff Cool Water with classic florals? Roudnitska's account of its creation would have been interesting.

A ripe and fetid smell of a discarded banana peel covers a softly clean and soapy, herbal, mossy, ambery perfume of absolute smoothness. The ripe fruit reminds one of the infamous rotting garbage note of Diorella, with the melon being subtly more floral and moving closer to rotting banana (ylang). The heart has subtle leather that resembles Le Parfum de Therese. The soapy, piney note kinda resembles Rochas Moustache. A gentle cedar node underpins the whole thing. The comment in a review below of sea breeze blowing over a Provencal garden and a cedar grove is perfect. The whole is altogether beautiful and smooth. If this is a wholly synthetic composition (and I don't doubt it), it is a perfect example of how pure aroma chemicals can perform in the hands of a master who is truly in command of their craft. An absolute delight. So glad I got it!

This closely resembles Byredo Green, probably my favourite "green" fragrance. The leather in Ocean Rain gives it another dimension though, and the rose is really nice, not too sharp. What sets them apart after a while, is that Green turns soapy, Ocean Rain turns woody. Because of the aquatic notes in Ocean Rain, it also evokes the image of a grassy/floral lining just before you walk onto a sandy beach. Green on the other hand, puts you right in the middle of thick brush surrounded by flowers. It's actually kind of hard to describe this one, but it's a woody/floral/aquatic I guess. This is a wonderful, and calming fragrance.