SHADID

First impressions from initial unpacking yesterday, and today a side-by-side comparison with L'Oudh (also by Tauer), are the two are quite similar, but the new Shadid being a little cleaner to my uncalibrated nose, if that makes sense. I definitely enjoy both, but I think my wife and the general public will prefer Shadid on me. I find L'Oudh to be a fantastic scent, and am in no way disparaging it.

Why are folks so concerned with names and bottle design? Andy Tauer is a genius...if his juice were delivered in a jar and called "pisswater", I would still buy it. I am wearing Sundowner right now and am transported. Please, friends, do not compromise the integrity of the Fragrantica rating system by rating fragrances you have never smelled, and certainly not based on bottle design and labeling.

My first impression was absolute love. You can definiteIy pick up the Tauerade with what I would have sworn was an oud and rose layered on top. This is a brilliantly done Ambergris, musky scent with a slight but very nice funk that hints to old school Oriental musk fragrances that you just cannot find anymore. Great stuff!

Another creamy, spicy-but-soft, musky unisex winner from Andy Tauer. To me, it takes the best elements of his Au Cour, des Alpes, Heraud and Sundowner and combines them flawlessly. I love this stuff!! Thanks, Andy!

General comment here: Why would anyone review an unreleased perfume they have not smelled?

There is very little in Shadid that is what it claims to be. The castoreum here is castoreum only in name. Animalic musk functions as metaphor rather than material. Oud, as an oud without oud, never fully arrives, remaining only a promise somewhere in the depths of the composition. Andy Tauer does not use animal-derived materials. The densest regions of this perfume—its animality, its resins, its oud-like darkness—are all quotations of absent things. And it is precisely this chain of absences that forms Shadid's most remarkable achievement. Whether one regards that as a flaw or a virtue determines how one reads the perfume. The official story centers on a rare nagarmotha essential oil. There was enough stock for only 235 bottles, and so 235 bottles were made. It is an almost agricultural account of limitation: the scarcity of the raw material determined the size of the edition. This deeply smoky root, occupying roughly a quarter of the formula, is presented as the perfume's central theme. That is probably true as far as it goes. Yet the story alone cannot explain Shadid's fascination. Tauer is not a perfumer who exhibits materials. With a doctorate in chemistry and a background in molecular biology, he is one of perfumery's clearest architects. L'Air du Désert Marocain—that desert atmosphere assembled from coriander, cumin, and cistus resin—was never an exhibition of ingredients. It was a space brought into existence. In Tauer's desert, the sand itself is surprisingly unimportant. What matters is the scaffolding of amber and resins built to evoke heat and distance. To me, Shadid appears as a return to the desert-space construction of L'Air du Désert Marocain. Here again, he is not building a landscape but the perception of one. Follow the scent closely and the mechanics become visible. The opening coriander brushes the air with a streak of green coolness before quickly withdrawing. What remains is nagarmotha. Ordinarily this heavy, low-register root, rich in slow-evaporating sesquiterpenes, would be buried in the foundation of a perfume as a fixative. Tauer excavates it and places it at center stage. He asks the bass note to carry the melody. Smoky, earthy, almost charred, the root continues to resonate from the center of the composition. Around it, a synthetic castoreum accord is wrapped in dry vanilla. From their encounter emerges a leather illusion that neither possesses alone: dry, slightly sweet, and curiously convincing. Where there is no animal, animal hide appears. This is not complexity discovered but complexity engineered. Illuminating the weight of the foregrounded root from within is a dry amber radiance reminiscent of ambroxan—a glow that grants transparency to the mass of smoke and gently lifts its contours upward. What emerges is an oud without oud. Place this cousin of papyrus in the foreground and drape it in amber radiance, and the darkness and depth commonly associated with oud materialize without oud itself. For this reason, Shadid's closest relative is Tauer's own L'Oudh. Yet Shadid feels cleaner and more abstract than its sibling. The animal leather and oud associated with Arabian perfumery are evoked here through citation rather than substance. Even its Arabian imagery is a quotation, a costume. This carefully constructed evocation possesses a temporal arc. As an extrait, Shadid lingers on skin for many hours, yet what it leaves gradually thins. After the central glow holds for a long stretch, the leather recedes, the oud illusion withdraws, and the sweetness of vanilla sinks away. In the end, only a dry cedar trace close to the skin remains. The animal is gone. The phantom oud is gone. The vastness of the desert is gone. What evaporates is precisely what had been built as absence. That the bare material—a fragment of dry wood—is all that survives proves that such richness was never contained within the ingredients. It had been summoned. At this point one may recall a solitary flower blooming in the Mojave: the ghost flower. Rising from scorched earth like a pale translucent apparition, it has long been associated with the supernatural precisely because it blooms where life seems almost impossible. Shadid is that flower. It evokes animality, oud, Arabian fantasy, and desert immensity while literally possessing none of them. A mirage. A fragrant apparition shimmering between presence and absence. This mirage was not discovered. It was constructed. The most boring truth one can tell about Shadid is that the number 235 was determined by the stock of a rare root. The richest truth is that almost nothing within it is what it claims to be. And it is not beautiful despite that fact. It is beautiful because of it. Animality without animals. Oud without oud. A desert without sand. Tauer is not bowing before the scarcity of materials. He composes absence itself. The story of rarity obscures this achievement. It shifts attention away from the perfumer's hand and toward the inventory count of a root. Yet the ghost that rises from Shadid was not created by a sedge growing in an Indian wetland. It was assembled by a chemist's hand in Höngg, on the edge of Zurich. One may call that gesture restraint. But restraint of what? If restraint means the humility of not adding what could be added, there is no such hand here. What exists instead is an elaborate act of artifice—adding, assembling, illuminating, and misleading the senses. The hand that appears to have withdrawn before the material is, in truth, the hand that wrote the most. Shadid is not a modest perfume. It is an architecture of absence, built with extraordinary skill. 7/10

Shadid means strong and I was expecting a beastly fragrance but i find it pretty soft and gentle. The animalics go in a leather direction, and work in harmony with the dry vanilla nature of the fragrance. It has the powdery dusty Tauer DNA and with the vanilla it smells like dry dessert wind carrying vanilla seeds. I think its reminiscent of L'air du desert marocain replacing the incense with animalic leather and adding vanilla to the dry dessert wind. It's pretty linear, i was hoping for more development but overall i am really enjoying it.

Oh Shadid, Another beautiful creation by the legendary house of Tauer! Shadid is so gorgeous: animalic, spicy, woody and a little sweet.The fragrance is masterfully blended, musky, creamy (from the sandalwood, it’s not lactonic), robust and has that airy, notable Tauer DNA. Completely unisex! The way the sandalwood was handled for this composition is exceptional. So happy that I was blessed to get my hands on a bottle. Can’t wait to feel this whaft against my face as it’s carried by the winter breeze!

First impressions: A rather dark, animalic opening. Heavy and strong, somewhat reminiscent of Mancera Red Tobacco but with less sweetness and no tobacco. Oud-y without oud. Appears to be very long lasting. Two sprays felt quite enough.

Okay so I thought this perfume is pretty terrible. I've not engaged in community activities like bottle splits and actually caring about new releases and such but on this occasion I bought into the hype for Andy Tauer's new limited edition perfume, liked the sound of the notes prior and chipped in to a blind split to see what it was all about. When it arrived curiously the outside of the vial smelled of a lightly fruity, vanilla, toffee sort of smell which is bizarre because most of this perfume is a big lump of leather accord. It's got that pitchy, twang of saffron and castoreum and some types of oud about it but paired with that vanillic backdrop it feels, disjointed and 'wrong' somehow. The vanilla is not even prominent for the most part it feels like and afterthought but is almost more tenacious than the main gubbins which is a sort of animalic, leathery type of smell, conjured by Tauer and it's not out of his usual penchant for stinky or smoky things. I just found it a little ugly and especially with this sweet, gacky backend which is ever present but kinda ghostly and feels very separate from the main accord, some may enjoy this duality or see something brilliant which I don't but I find no cohesion in this perfume really and that's something which I associate with the best of Tauer's work. I hate to evoke LDDM here (because there's no similarity) but that's arguably his best (certainly most well known and iconic work) a fragrance which hangs together so well, has tons of complexity but gives you it all at once, in a very linear fashion. But greatness is greatness but that stuff just works, not expecting him to reach those heights with every release or indeed ever again but Shadid isn't even close to that level for me. Interestingly enough the late drydown loses all the leathery oudniness and even most of the vanilla and stripped back it's a very woody, dry cedar skin scent, which it's kinda okay. It' a strange fish, I have 10ml's of it which I don't really want. A fun gamble but didn't pay off for me.

Shahid starts out with a similar cuddly, dense "milk chocolate" note to Tauer's other recent scent Heraud. Or maybe it's not exactly chocolate; it's more about a musky hot-breath effect, with a thread of creamy sweetness running through it. Very gentle, very mellow. I'm a little disappointed; it's very simple, and there's something stuffy and cloying about it. Despite the notes, it doesn't have the darkness or growly animalism of castoreum or the smokiness of nagarmotha. It's just musty and furry, like a cat in a dusty attic, with a cocoa-butter sweetness alongside the fuzz. Some people might find it subtle and cozy; I find it heavy and dull.

a piece of crap....shame on Tauer for releasing this perfume.. so weak, I can hardly smell it on my skin and clothes... and nothing new at all...and so so expensive..

@grzyzwywo It is confused. Being inspired by a late night Vegas drive but having middle Eastern touches and being named the Arabic word for "strength", is indeed muddled. How would YOU link a long Vegas drive to being "strong"? Ps. I'd never vote on a scent I've never smelled. This is idiocy.

Weird! The name is in Arabic and the bottle is themed in Arabisc drawing, but the description says it's inspired by a desert drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and it's reflecting the traditions of oriental perfumery . Kinda confusing!!!

Unlike other comments here, I find nothing is confusing about this. The name is inspired by, and the description of the fragrance are two different things. Easy. Can't wait to try it!

I swear I've smelt something close to it. It's really difficult to find a unique limited edition fragrance.

Beware. The FOMO Army are unleashing out their feelings of disappointment and frustration.

So disappointing. A sharper version of Silver Oud from AMOUAGE, with more vanilin. Crap.

I like.to test this fragrance. Shadid typography is Nastaliq. ( Persian Typography )

@Messner8850 This bottle looks great. Not everything needs to be extreme minimal.

nothing special COPIED silver oud.. and lied about it being limited edition

nothing special and lied about it being limited edition