Sultan

Sultan is one of 3-5 gourmands I recommend to people, depending on their level of interest, as a signature winter/date night fragrance. Since first wearing Sultan in London and subsequently testing other end-game gourmands, what I've come to appreciate about Sultan the most is that at no point do you get a feeling like the components are cheap (this is my experience with the drydown of Xerjoff's Symphonium). Lets talk profile. Very dense, sweet cloud in the air. Heavy vanilla with amber, nothing floral, nothing boozy. From up close, the driver of the scent is a balsamic/medicinal wood that is present in very few other gourmands - and those gourmands are the ones listed at the top of the "Smells like" section which are Initio's Absolute Aphrodisiac and Atelier des Ors' Lune Feline. Neither of these two are 1:1 - for Initio's AA the base is more medicinal and in the air it's more caramel-burnt sugar than it is vanilla; for Lune Feline the base is more balsamic (turning smoky) and you get mainly a cardamom top note (I would call this scent a combination of Xerjoff's Starlight and Nishane's Ani, combined with a balsamic base; but watch for the drydown where the smoky-balsamic aspects shine). To add: This comparison is for the EDP version of Lune Feline. The extrait version of Lune Feline is more comparable to a hypothetical Amouage gourmand, in that on skin the scent smells more like the darker base notes than it does of the sweeter spices. As it floats around in the air, the DNA is basically intact. When you think about other very sweet gourmands that dominate in the air, the two that come to my mind are Kilian's Intoxicated and Roja's Sweetie Aoud. Just like those 2, depending on how easy or how aggressive you go on the trigger, this can end up quite suffocating. I once put on 10 sprays on a hot sunny day in Knightsbridge and must've had a scent cloak of 10 feet behind me. As someone who is strictly a niche hipster and hasn't tried some of the women's skin products that commonly get mentioned, I would say that as a fragrance, this truly is in a class on its own for blend quality and profile which is why I love it so dearly. I'm not going to recommend it strictly due to the ~€600 I paid for this, but I will take great pride knowing that Royal Crown as a brand prices out most customers and as a result I have something that ~nobody else does. If you can get this for 200, 300 - literally what are you waiting for. I'm sure it will fit in nicely at the forefront of any collection just for the bottle alone.

I did a small course with a friend’s mother who worked in Givaudan. She had a really nice case full of different raw materials to use in fragrances. One day she showed us 3 different “vanillas”. The first one, vanillin, was the one I was more familiar with, the one I normally perceived as “vanilla” in designer fragrances and woman splashes. I actually liked it a lot. The second one she called “bourbon vanilla”. It was quite different, drier and less sweet, I do not remember this one that well, but was the one I liked the less. The last one was “Madagascar’s vanilla absolute”. I just melted smelling that one; it was darker, creamier, fuller and sooo mouthwatering. I loved it. After that course I knew that was my favorite note, followed by natural sandalwood. I wanted a fragrance based on that to wear, looked a lot of vanillas and gourmands, but everyone was just either too feminine or had a vanilla masked with too much spices/ambers/incense; and no one showed me that amazing quality of vanilla. Some months ago I ordered some fragrances from my fragrance “dealer”; he normally sends me small testers to check new fragrances. I did not know this fragrance, but there it was a small vial to check it. I sprayed it and immediately felt that amazing complex creamy vanilla, it was amazing! I kept smelling my wrist all day. The dense almost chocolatey vanilla was always present but some warm wood and spicy smokiness was developing. I just loved it, the smokiness was just enough, it moves it a little into the masculine side but is not cloying as in by the fireplace. Some sandalwood to make it even better! This is just amazing, not only the fragrance but the performance, the vanilla is always there, for 30h easily, it does not start protecting like crazy to become a skin scent after some hours, no! It has that amazing projection for the entire live of the fragrance until I wash it. I love this, my girlfriend doesn’t that much, she calls it “burnt marshmallow”. This is not my favorite fragrance just because it is really sweet, powerful and cozy, so I can only wear it at nights and when going out. 10/10 just too amazing

So I originally tried this many years ago when it first came out, I had gotten a max aroma 5ml and it was amazing, super strong, super thick, very addictive. So I bided my time a bit to see if there was a way to buy this on discount, I finally found one, full presentation, the juice was super weak and not nearly as thick smelling. It was from a reputable source. I chatted with someone else who owned several bottles of this, and they concurred that they also bought from the same reputable source at the time and the juice for her was also terribly weak, so we came to the conclusion this went through a bad batch era, I resold it and never looked back until about a week ago, fragbuy had gotten testers in for $199 cad ($141usd) and so it was too cheap not to take a second chance on, i used a 10% off code, which only paid for my provincial taxes, but people in the states ended up getting it for $127 because they don’t pay taxes. So I said to myself I could easily resell and break even if need be. So I got it in, the tester came with a cap which it wasn’t supposed to! amazing on fragbuy for that, this is the black bottle with all gold cap. I lucked out because this batch is just as I remember, super strong, thick and amazing. Couldn’t be happier with the purchase

Always been a big vanilla fan, and as a man it can be very difficult to find a great masculine fragrance with a vanillic base. I owned Nishane Ani before Sultan, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.. even purchased a backup bottle. A few months back my favorite decanter from our favorite FB fragcom group, Fragrance Marketplace, sent me a freebie sample of Royal Crown Sultan. Told me he thought I'd "enjoy it". Well, he wasn't completely wrong... because I didn't just enjoy it, I absolutely fell in love with it! I'm not going to give you a ton of explanation on each note or how complex it is... I'm just going to give you a very simple explanation of how this smells on my skin: "Smoldering vanilla wood chips 🔥🔥🔥" To me, that's the best way I can explain it. The smokiness is like the best incense you've ever smelled while burning, combined with this subtlety of delicious vanilla that compliments the smokiness in the best of ways. Not sure how ppl feel this is "cheap" or "unoriginal".... never smelled anything quite like it and it's definitely one that'll have you secretly sniffing your wrists throughout the day. 🤣🙂

This fragrance is powerful. So powerful that even one spray could be overwhelming in the wrong place. But it’s so wonderful. It envelops you and seems to last forever and ever. When I first smelt the fragrance I was overwhelmed by it’s intensity, not being able to smell anything but labdanum and myrrh. Slowly the vanilla peeks it’s head out of a thick cloud of smoke. Then a dance between myrrh and vanilla begins. There may have been dates, I wasn’t able to tell over the intensity of the myrrh. To me, this what Absolute Aphrodiasc and gold myrrh absolute would smell like if combined into one fragrance. Absolute Aphrodiasc has the similar dirty, leathery, dense smoke-vanilla thing going on. Whereas gold myrrh absolute has the myrrh and incense, just in Sultan it’s amped up. I do love this scent but it’s very powerful when wearing EDIT: Wearing sultan today just made me realize how much I truly love it. Smokey, lots of resins and myrrh, the benzoin + Cistus lab. create the date note, and then it’s topped off with vanilla. Even if I am looking for a dense date note fragrance, this one is pretty stellar