Café de Dua

Amazing gourmand scent! 🍫☕️🧁 Mostly chocolate, vanilla with a splash of coffee. But that isn't everything, there is buttery cake, and maple nuances. Perfect scent for Autumn and Winter 🍁❄️

Vietnamese condensed milk coffee. The fragrance that got me into DUA, this has you smelling like you spilt vanilla milk coffee on yourself.

Cafe beans! Im not a coffee connoisseur but it smells like the grocery store isle with the coffee beans! So good!

Café de Dua is a 2021 release and original blend that entails the smells of a diverse café, from coffee itself to cookies, cakes, maple, chocolate, and vanilla, a quite heterogenous mix of different goods that one might smell being prepared or enjoyed in a cafe. Its successor, Café de Dua 2.0, entails a lot more coffee and a bit less sweetness, and that fragrance is my preference of the two, in large part due to how much I enjoy coffee as an intensive note in fragrance, but this original Café de Dua is more the blended gourmand, sweeter, and a bit more sumptuous. Surely it’s one of Dua’s options that should be tried by gourmand fans. The Dua original Choco Biscotti is also similar, with a bit more of an emphasis on the dry cookie aspect and less the coffee, but with a significant amount of overlap, overall. 7 out of 10

I got a faint whiff of coffee, followed by an offensive and overwhelming pure rubbing alcohol smell. Just plain awful.

Cade de Dua has become a surprising favourite in my gourmand layering routine. I particularly enjoy pairing it with Crème de Chestnut & Vanille Français and Pistachio Treat - one spray each at different points on the front of my neck. The result is a beautifully blended, nutty gourmand experience that feels both indulgent and comforting. While Dua fragrances often receive mixed reactions, perhaps due to their flashy labelling, premium pricing for 30ml extrait bottles and the occasional hit-or-miss release, I find their gourmand offerings to be impressively well-crafted and true to their inspirations. That said, I believe Dua could benefit from a more curated approach. Slowing down on hybrid experiments and focusing on perfecting their inspired creations might ennoble their overall quality. Sometimes, less truly is more and a “quality over quantity” mindset could help refine their already promising range.

First whiff blew my mind, I thought it was pure love then it became increasingly sickening. It’s TOO sweet and TOO salty at the same time. The dry down takes on a very intense and bitter sweet/salty popcorn scent. It takes almost a full day before it’s manageable up close, for me. After about 24 hours, it’s the softest salted caramel latte but that requires me spraying it on whatever item of clothing I’ll be wearing an entire day before and locking that away in the closet until it’s time to wear it. Usually with a punchy scent like this, it can be balanced by layering but not Cafe de Dua. It’s so strong, literally no other scent can manipulate those notes.