Leather Up

Simply put...EXCELLENT! If you're expecting it to smell like your normal harsh leather fragrance this is not for you. It's like wearing a suede jacket that is still holding your previous scents of light florals and sweet Saffron and a touch of left over Oud. Definitely not a heavy projecting scent but by no means a skin scent. I feel in love with it upon first sniff. Leather Up dueled with its brother Obscure Oud for my attention and inevitable purchase. I chose Leather Up! Only because of my many Oud scents in my collection and my wife's eeny meeny miny mo tie breaker. And judging from my crowds response (my close friends and family at dinner) the compliments continued the whole night. Everyone continually sniffed me to make sure the wonderful scent that was wafting in the air was actually coming from me and not a room scent of the fancy restaurant we were dining. The quotes were "DAMN YOU SMELL GOOD!" "OH WOW THAT'S NOT YOUR NORMAL COLOGNE!" And "LET ME SNIFF YOU AGAIN!" So to put the rap on this review it's definitely a crowd pleaser that's mysterious and alluring. Not a loud bullying fragrance that you smell coming. And definitely not a docile shy run of the mill scent you don't pay attention to. It's the casual unassuming attractive calm scent that confidently enters the room and says "Hey..."

I was recently given this to test while at Barneys. First impressions: The fragrance tries to hard to be everything in hopes of pleasing everyone, and it ends up being rather a let down. The opening notes can't decide whether to hint at the upcoming complexity and depth of the heart & base, so it skews toward being light and sharp. The one note that is too bombastic was the whiskey accord. It's really difficult to get past smelling like you've had a glass of Dewars thrown at you, and that's precisely how this felt. No hint of leather at all. Remaining impressions: Where's the leather? The title suggests it should be prominent, but I still smell like liquor. Everything else is so muddled that as to become indistinguishable. It just hints at being 'something' but lacks that signature note because the leather and suede that are allegedly there are drowned out by everything else. Toward the end, the Oud peeks through and it's also an anti-climax because it's just 'in-there somewhere' and not very highlighted. Leaves with the impression of "another fragrance that had to jump on the Oud bandwagon and hasn't done a decent job of it". At the end of it, the only thing that makes this an unforgettable experience is how poor the execution was. For all the good notes and great promise the description holds, it's astounding how it doesn't even merit mediocrity. tl;dr version: A hot mess with an identity crisis. Unforgettable for all the wrong reasons.

'Leather up' from Phuong Dang is a perfume nothing like what I have read about it. At approximately € 660 per 100 ml. it comes at a hefty pricetag but with Black Friday I got good discount. Plus that I have the strange affliction that, how more negative the reviews how more I MUST have it. At Fragrantica you had the discussion if you were influenced by bad reviews and if you had perfume skeletons in the closet (i.e. perfumes you once liked and now grew ashamed about). I was the only one who... hadn't any remorse. People who don't like the perfume I wear can go fuck themselves. So when I had read Kafkaesques' unbelievably and extended negative review about this perfume I knew I HAD TO ABSOLUTELY HAVE IT. It is also interesting to write abstractly about the phenomenon of "negative reviews". If I don't like a perfume I would never review it. the 'Leather up' imposes in its name that of a gay bar scent or something kinky. And the person writing the review in Kafkaesque didn't do anything to diminish this sensation. Not that there is something wrong with those connotations, but herhis argument was: the leather goes on and on, and....on. For hours to such degree shehe had to scrub it off. Oh and the listed Oudh was nowhere to be found. For me this was the incisive review that hauled me over. Let me say that yesterday, still boxed, I already smelled a chic perfume, flowery. As we had with Giorgio and Poison and, Knowing. It was also very strong with Promise from Dominique Ropion (Frederic Malle). But the Leather up is nothing, nothing what has been written about it. What I smell is a beautiful, full perfume, flowery, with a decent base 12 hours in thanks to the ambergris and Oudh. I had the leathershock which I recognised, thanks to Domique Ropion, as the cypriol. It was bad, but social enough to soon let other facets again, bloom. What struck me the most was that it predominantly is a flowery perfume with Iris, Rose, Carnation and Mimosa, all, ALL, at one moment or another making their appearance. The Kafkaesque went on that it was so boozy with the whiskey note but oh that wasn't multilayered peety whiskey but [wine? rosé? tawny sherry?]. But I definitely smelled a substantial booze aspect streamlined into a Glennfiddich. Yet in this perfume everything compliments all the other notes. The most consistent perhaps the Oudh which is there from start to finish and even, unopened, along with the cypriol and the rose, out of the unopened flacon in its beautiful sarcophagous box. It is simple: I smell the leather of Memo's French Leather (Suède) and this must be the leather, cypriol and labdanum, oudh, whiskey and rose. It is as how you like your leather. Yesterday there was a leathermoment of an inimpenetrable wall yet then soon the leather became "holistic" again and booze, flowers, oudh and ambergris took over. If you have spritzed this perfume on, when you wake up and smell your pulse it is a divine moment in a sophisticated junglist garden. It is a rather overcivilized than blunt perfume which you have, at no moment, to scrub off. On the contrary: it elevates you to the hyperspheres.