Perfume Review: Lorenzo Villoresi Alamut

I’ve been putting off reviewing Alamut for almost two weeks. Whenever I think of writing about it, I stumble upon a very solid mental block. Alamut is nice, it is lush, it is very wearable. But gosh is it boring! Which is surprising, because, after all, this is Lorenzo Villoresi’s scent, and his other scents are anything but boring. Named after the mountain fortress in the hills by the Elburz mountains, the scent has been described as something right out of The Thousand and One Nights, as a sensual journey to the Orient, as a fragrant Arabesque. As far as I am concerned, it is not nearly opulent and ornamented enough to qualify as such. It flirts with the idea of being exotic, dark, spicy and mysterious, but never fully commits to the idea. As a result, the scent is a case of Almost But Not Quite. It is almost opulent but not quite, almost piquant but not quite, almost interesting but not quite. Alamut starts with a plummy, ambery, woody sort of rose, it is a lovely, velvety and dark accord that seems promising but evolves into a surprisingly pale and a little sharp sort of middle stage, where all kinds of flowers, from orange blossom to ylang ylang are jumbled together into a messy kind of a bouquet. From that point forward even the vaguest traces of the “fragrant Arabesque” disappear. Admittedly, the drydown, heavy on amber and sandalwood, is very much that of an oriental scent, but it is not sensual, mysterious and striking enough to be fit for even the least exciting of the tales in The Thousand and One Nights. Alamut is available on First in Fragrance, €95.00-135.00.