Eau de Quinine

In my search for the botanical ingredient: quinine, I blind bought this. While the backbone herbaceous heart is like a spice box, jovan musk from the local drugstore dominates. Maybe this is a real window into how Elizabethan scents swung. Did Sir Walter whip this up in the Tower from imported traces of the New World? This will not inspire a g&t note. More a furniture store north of Covent Garden in the 18thC. Even you may encounter at Cafe Nero after hours.

Stunningly zesty/bitter/herbal/astringent openting. Very bracing and invigorating. Evolves into a zingy, powdery-sweet, still zesty drydown. Interesting and unique Victorian style fragrance.

This scent has an awful powdery tone to it, very unexpected given the notes. I find it fussy, fusty, and far too sweet. Do not blind buy!

I think Crown's Eau de Quinine is one of the forgotten gems from last century. It smells so nice, but little people pay attention to it. Maybe it's because that quinine is a dated word and it presents a dated fashion? I don't know. For me, quinine is a thing far far away from my ordinary life, malaria disappeared decades ago. Only from the tonic water, I know vaguely what quinine smells/tastes like. For a few while, Crown's Eau de Quinine smells just like the tonic water, zesty and bitter citrus. Then it moves to the next phrase, and next. One of my friend became fascinated by it: it has so many "faces", from fougere to herbal, even little flora and bit aldehyde. Eau de Quinine's each phrase smells smooth and simple (so well blended that it's hard to pick a single note), but it keeps changing, and I think it's really a complex, or more precisely, an exquisite scent. It has the typical mossy basenotes of Crown scents, so delicate and elegant, it never shows a hint of wetness and dirtness that moss usualy smells. The staying power is great, an aftershave lasts about 8hrs which surpasses lots modern EDTs. And time let it aged well, make it such a sauve and refined scent.