Al Ward Al Musk

This thing is magnificent. Totally deep red-purple velvet! There is black roses, deep, cool and kind of sad, like roses in mourning. They are teamed with the light, apple scent of briar roses. You do not usually meet this combination of notes, sort of youth and maturity together. There is a sweaty sandalwood note that I believe is shamama. As Angela A below points out, this can like BO but I love it. In my cultural context, this reads as hippy the same way patchouli does in others. Either way, I am sold. There's a lot of complexity in this mix. It ends with an unexpected, salty oakmoss note. Al Ward Al Musk is a buxom, full bodied fragrance with impressive 14hr or more longevity but only moderate sillage, so pretty crowd friendly if you are in the right crowd. I suspect this could work well as a Goth fragrance. My only disappointment with this is that I had been hoping that this was the poopy kind of black musk but it is the vegetal kind full of spikenard. This one is going to be a back up bottle situation for me.

I wanted to add a footnote to my previous review. After a very long rest, the sweaty note previous mentioned diminishes and the amount of darker roses too. Ny bottle currently is the most lovely combination of briar roses and ocean air (oakmoss). It gets more amazing over time. EDIT: if you like this but can't deal with the animalic notes, try Abdul Karim Al Faransi Jakarta. Everything that's good about this without the challenging notes.

Strong and masculine perfume, i can't smell the bouquet of flowers, but just musk and green notes. After 12h is still perceptible on my skin and it has a moderate sillage from the beginning by the end. It's a good perfume, but absolutely not indicated for a lady.

This scent makes quite an impression, but it’s just too much for me. It is (as the kids say) “too hot to handle.” The opening is a powerful soapy, floral and green mixture. Intriguing, not bad in itself, but clean and well-defined. The transition to the middle notes was the big problem for me. The transition on this is really abrupt and harsh and I just couldn’t take the heart of this fragrance. Green notes just stay for an incredibly long time - the spices and rose start to come to the fore after awhile, but the green is still dominant. Green notes finally die down after longer than expected, and the spices now dominate with the florals but the intensity is just too powerful. The end of this fragrance is just as heady as the rest, consisting of a sweet honey, and a pretty animalic musk. Overall, I might appreciate this more if it wasn’t so strong, but as it stands, this isn’t something I would recommend, though samples are available to try.

I want to like this one, but I can't. This is the second Rasasi I have tried, and both have given me horrible headaches. I'm not sure if it's the strong rose scent that was common to both, but I had to scrub this one. It's definitely unisex,leaning more toward the masculine. Very rose/oud, almost exactly the same as Rasasi's Shatha al Oud in an oil. A positive--the picture of the bottle doesn't do it justice. It's just beautiful.