Soul by Costume National (2015)

Nose: Dominique Ropion

This new addition to Costume National’s fragrances range represents the unnecessary confirmation that the only good Costume National scents ever made where the early couple of ones composed by Bruyère – 21 and Scent Intense. It almost seems the guys at Costume National share this feeling as well, since Soul smells basically like an unneeded rewriting of Scent Intense crossed with influences from some of those contemporary Middle East cheap brands which are quite invading the market lately – brands like Arabian Oud, Lattafa, Swiss Arabian and countless of similar ones, with their nuclear, and often sweetish spicy-smoky oud and/or leather blends. Soul is for me exactly halfway all of that, and I wonder why they hired some renowned nose like Ropion for such an uninspired, clerical copy-and-paste job. Soul definitely keeps Scent Intense’s peculiar bone structure of powerful, sort of dry and extremely synthetic amber-musk-fruity notes, and boringly crosses it with a smoky praline of vanilla and artificial, sort of medicinal-nutty oud with a dark shade of leathery patchouli and a greyish salty feel of ambergris. The result is basically “Scent Intense Oud & Patchouli” with a whiff of M7’s trademark ambery-medicinal oud.

Is it any good? Well, sort of. If you like Scent Intense, then that’s still way above this, as it smells richer, more quality and more fascinatingly complex, and also kind of more focused; if you don’t care for it, then Soul may be a slightly more peculiar than usual sort of “futuristic”, androgynous, dirty yet sort of “aseptic” take on oud and synthetic leather with an initially stomach-piercing galore of powdery-musky vanilla tinged with a nondescript candy vibe. A powerful sweetish musky candy with a drop of cheap smoky oud & patchouli, and an everlasting artificial and linear drydown... sounds familiar, eh? Nothing that probably some Middle Eastern drugstore brand isn’t already doing for ten dollars a bottle. Not abysmal, but go for Scent Intense anyway.

6-6,5/10