Etrange

SO STRANGE I LOVE IT Etrange is French for strange. This is my absolute favorite fragrance form the Strange Invisible Perfumes line. Love that name by the way. I first bought this perfume about a month after coming back from Grasse France and having learned as much as I possibly could about fragrance and felt that nothing could be better for furthering my education than to buy fragrances with unusual and unique accords and notes, with formulas that are not typically found in most designer fragrances selling today at Sephoras Macys Nordstroms and so forth. And with the Strange Invisible Perfumes that's exactly what you get. These are fragrances that are so far away from the gourmand garbage selling today (La Vie Est Belle, cough). This has no chocolate, no pralines, no vanilla, no grapefruit,passion fruit, citrus, none of the traditional top-middle-base notes you find in perfume. But you're not getting pure chemicals like the Ambroxan in JULIETTE HAS A GUN NOT A PERFUME. What you have here is something so incredible and so different that for me it's such a pleasure to wear and to enjoy as a fragrance that just can't be duplicated. Yes, this has one note which could be called a gourmand: ginger. This is not a big ginger but it blends well with sweetness of flowers. The flowers are abstract and took me a while to distinguish them. I could definitely smell jasmine. This fragrance is just not big on flowers. The resins are the strongest accord. So it's mainly a very woodsy fragrance an the woods are very much the woods you'd find in an Oriental fragrance, namely sandalwood. This is a realistic sandalwood. Although its not listed, there is possibly a note of patchouli and incense which makes it dark and smoky, very smoky. When I smelled the seaweed and aquatic notes, that's when I really understood the concept of this fragrance. I wore this a lot for an entire week to get people to notice because it's quite strong and leaves behind a trail of scent, mysterious, exotic and just as the name tells you, STRANGE. It turned heads and noses. People asked me what perfume I was wearing. My friend Charita from India was most helpful in recognizing not the perfume but what this fragrance is trying to evoke or recreate. This is a beach in Mumbai (Bombay) India. This is one of those Oriental fragrances with an incense note which mixed with seawood/water ends up smelling like you're walking along the shores of some Asian country like India, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Thailand. They might as well called this fragrance Bangkok. It smells like you're walking by the shore with splashing waves, and seaweed is collecting by your feet and not far away within sight is a Buddhist or Hindu temple where there's a lot of incense and smoke. This was so beautiful and almost like a religious experience. But that being said for me this was great but I won't wear this too much anymore because it did get too etrange! I wouldn't want to make this my signature scent. This is a fragrance I'd wear infrequently just to smell different from everybody else once in a while. This might not work for your body chemistry either if you're unable to handle resins. The seaweed might also not be to your liking. This is truly a well made Oriental, a very graphic scent of India or Thailand so I would prefer to wear this IN India or Thailand where people might not even notice it LOL I recommend this fragrance to experienced and mature noses who have a love of crazy notes that are brilliantly composed and put together If you liked Freak by Illmasqua, the other perfumes in Strange Invisible Perfumes, if you like artsy avant garde perfumes like the Imaginary Authors fragrances, or the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab and Papillon Artisan this is totally your kind of fragrance. I loved it. Beautiful, strange, exotic, mysterious, a scent of the South Asian sea.