Oh, my god. Picture a hairy man wearing a loin cloth, standing on a tree stump, shouting, “I AM A GENTLEMAN!”

That is the opening of this perfume.

I have never had a scent actually make me feel more confident. What an amazing smell. I feel like I could hunt down a wildebeest. Or close a corporate merger. Either way.

In my short time since I began exploring fragrance, I wondered what a “chypre” was. I suspected from reading that most of my experience had been with fougeres. Outside of the vast variation available there, I couldn’t imagine a cologne smelling some “other way”.

Now, I remember.

The second I put this on, I recognized it from… somewhere in the past. I might have been rightly turned down for a job that I made it to the second interview round of by someone wearing it. I think the lawyer who once one an unemployment suit for me might have worn something like this, or maybe the judge when I was arrested for criminal trespass 3rd degree when I was 16. Or maybe, just maybe, as a child, reading my favorite Doctor Strange comic books, watching him traverse the Dark Dimension in mystic battle against the Dread Dormammu and Baron Mordo, I imagined he smelled like this.

Yes, I think that last one might be it. This is the scent of a man who can perceive an eldritch threat against this very dimension, and knows what to do about it. A man who saves an entire realm against the threat of the Mindless Ones and hardly breaks a sweat.

At least, provided he can do it within the next 20-30 minutes. Because by that point, the scent already begins to fade.

Two and a half hours later, it’s a ghost of a scent, a barely-there nimbus of occasional warm spice.

After three hours, it’s not even that. The hairy gentleman’s lunch break is long over and he’s gone back to his desk in the accounting office, still content from the memory of the wildebeest he caught for lunch but beginning to feel that mid-afternoon drowse. He’s still in control but glad meetings are over for the day. Here in the Dark Dimension, the Mindless Ones have broken through the barrier, the Omnipotent Oshtur can’t be bothered to heed my summons, and I’ve accidentally stepped on the Wand of Watoomb and broken it in two. True story.