Monday, October 14, 2019

Spiritus Dei by DUA

Inspired by “By Killian’s Single Malt” this is a boozy scent…but, what is boozy scent? When some people hear boozy fragrance, the image on their heads might be of a drunk person and that perspiration of alcohol, the smell inside a car when someone who’s been drinking gets in or perhaps the smell of a bar after a full night of drinking…but it’s not…boozy scents are an olfactory experience reminiscent of high end liquors minus the alcohol and, what I consider more important, a different base.

What do I mean by that? where a good Scotch has a barley & yeast base, a good boozy fragrance has a wood base, in the case of Spiritus Dei, it’s cedar that stays with you long after the initial opening is gone… but this fragrance is more than that, its a beautiful concoction of plum and vanilla, on first spray, it smells like good rum, it’s shocking, it makes you question wether you made the right decision with this fragrance because it truly opens like liquor….when I first put it on my wife immediately said “It smells like Coquito”, a traditional Puerto Rican Christmas-season drink that is heavy on rum. However, that first rum explosion is short lived (2 minutes) and the plum comes alive… but it’s the plum you would sniff on a good whiskey, its airy and pungent at the same time, its the kind of smell you need to keep ingesting…to keep savoring because it’s relentless, it stays with you and never loses that potency. The mid on this fragrance tends to get absorbed into the base, my journey with this fragrance goes from opening to base, without anything in the middle..perhaps its the strong rum scent in the beginning that knocks my senses for a quick minute, perhaps it’s that the single malt, plum, vanilla and the cedar are too strong, I don’t mind, this fragrance is one that makes me coming back to it. 

Why smell like a drink…? Someone asked me that. I don’t think of this as smelling like a drink, although I love a good single malt scotch, I would never pour it on me to absorb the smell. Whiskey tends to hide notes for you, makes you search for them (that is arguably half the fun of drinking them), Spiritus Dei tells you “Here’s your plum, your vanilla, your single malt, your cedar….go enjoy it, see how it complements you? See how it keeps giving?”. Performance on this can only be described in superlatives….”epic” perhaps comes to mind? This lasted on my skin way over 18 hours and on my clothes for 2 days. 4 sprays will do for the non-over-sprayer, with a a projection of at least 2-3 hours. So yes, this is what is commonly referred as beast mode in the frag community.

Maison 21 G

What do you think of creating your own scent? This was a question I asked myself when I got contacted by Maison 21 G to offer me their besp...