Saddle

Saddle does Shalimar exactly the way I’ve always wanted, prolonging that captivating opening where all of its ingredients are given and not yet arranged into any discrete unified order. It is acrid and smoky, and yet remarkably lucid. It confirms that Shalimar is as much of a great leather as it is an amber, and if you were to only experience its opening passage, you’d think that’s all it was. Saddle belongs to this amber-leather tradition, and its schema of influence is undeniable: bergamot, benzoin, patchouli, vanilla, leather, smoke. After suspending this sublime bitterness in olfactory time for as long as possible, Saddle passes its materials through a sieve, drawing out a lightness from them without leaving anything out – preserving the animalic force of its dominant leather accord, which is exactly where it departs from Shalimar and comes into its own.

Kind of weird and sweet and Smokey. It smells like leather in the way old school leather fragrances smell like leather in that it doesn’t. It’s like if you described the idea of leather to a perfume making alien and tasked them with creating the idea if leather with no leathery materials