Golden Aura

Earthy and powdery, an uncomfortable combination. My least favorite from the house.

I chose to begin my "niche house experience" with YeYe because they are local to me and had a reasonably priced discovery set, with the price of that set going toward a full-size bottle, should I fall in love. I really enjoyed playing with the set, spraying each offering on a paper blotter, wafting it to and fro, and seeing if I could guess any of the notes before looking at the descriptions. I used Golden Aura on my skin today and I smell bergamot, pimento berry (allspice) and musk straightaway, which all came off rather masculine to me. The bergamot burns off pretty soon after and once the musk settles a bit, the cashmeran was detectable to me. The florals don't creep in until even later, and are subtle. It's 6 hours later and now all I smell is a creamy vanilla, musky skin scent. It reminds me of all my favorite memories of young love - snuggles on the couch, mornings after, or masculine skin fresh from the shower....warm and clean and.....masculine. I don't mind a masculine note here and there, but the overall profile just didn't suit my decidedly het feminine sensibilities today (and maybe ever). For this reason, I'm not sure I can wear Golden Aura bc it's at odds with my general ethos when it comes to fragrance - to be able to inhabit a scent as part of my identity, to feel it suits a mood or moment in a mostly positive away (even if bittersweet sometimes?), and to have it accentuate something in myself that I'd like to project into the world at present. With Golden Aura, I smell like the conglomerate memory of all my ex-boyfriends, which isn't such a bad thing, but not really what I'm going for, personally. I'm still working out how I feel about ALL the scents I received in my discovery set from YeYe, let alone Golden Aura specifically. So many niche houses are doing unisex fragrances and I'm trying to keep an open mind, but I wonder if I'm too old to jump on that bandwagon. After decades of conditioning around what scents are masculine vs feminine, I'm not sure I have the wiring to appreciate unisex scents at this point, let alone fall in love with any of them. I will keep at it, if for no other reason than it's fun to explore, but so far Golden Aura is not a love.