Oyédo 
Diptyque (2000)

Lemon drops and cleaning products. Smells very medicinal, like children's chewable vitamin tablets or flavored antacid tablets.

This reminds me of an old-school British cologne, the sort of thing I associate with Geo F Trumper and the like. It basically smells like a lemon lollipop mixed with some sort of 70's bathroom cleaner smell (which I guess is the thyme). It fades quickly, leaving a faint smudge of herbal woods.

It feels dated to say that this smells like bathroom cleaner, because bathroom cleaner hasn't smelled like this for 30 years, but that's still the best description I have. I love a good traditional citrus eau, but this is not the kind I like.

Diptyque Oyédo (2000) is a fragrance that is supposed to be an homage to the Japanese yuzu, although whether or not it contains any real yuzu essence is debatable. Beyond this, there is a melange of citrus, an odd raspberry note that is "accidental" according to the brand, and then a simple woody base accented with thyme. There isn't much to really report about this stuff, as it is almost painfully simple, even more simple than a traditional neroli-focused eau de cologne, which at least has some interesting supporting players in the mix. I guess this makes sense, considering Oyédo began life as an interior room spray that came in one of the big old bottles Diptyque used to package them in, then saw release as an eau de cologne in the old square bottles, before finally seeing release as a candle and eau de toilette. Everything about Oyédo screams aromatherapy or some middling mall boutique focused on simple one-note-wonder juices like the kind that used to pop up then go under in a few years back in the 90's and 2000's. If you told me Oyédo was actually some $5 plastic bottle body spray that came from one of these stores or something stuck out on the end cap in the health and beauty aisle at Target, I'd not question.

The opening is lemon, lime, orange, and the yuzu, which together makes Oyédo smell something like the muscat gummies or tiny gelatin cups imported from Japan that you can sometimes get from the local Asian groceries here like Uajimaya or H-Mart. Beyond this, Oyédo seems to get its citrus from an overdose of citral, and does eventually show hints of that dry raspberry note, blamed on a synthetic called frambinone that reproduces the smell of berries that cannot otherwise be extracted naturally. The thyme finally shows up, but whatever is being used here for the wood note is bitter and unpleasant. I imagine there is some Iso E Super here but the cedary woody note doing the talking in the base is powered by a massive dose of linalool, which moves Oyédo into feeling like children's chewable orange-flavored Tylenol with that metallic chalkiness. This is something I absolutely cannot stand, so I suffered here to deliver these wear times for you. Wear time is about 6 hours which is okay for something obviously meant to be light and refreshing, but the yuzu-tinged citrus push goes poof in thirty minutes, leaving you with 5 1/2 hours of that chalk. Best use would probably be in summer time as something to wear outside or after a shower, and Oyédo reads totally unisex.

This was made in 2000, when perfume makers had a sort of fetish for vivid orange and exotic citrus notes anyway, as a awful amount of output from this time was focused on yuzu, orange, grapefruit, and so on. Clinique Happy for Men (1999) and Boss in Motion (2002) were two big pushers of this kind of vibe, but they were thicker, more complex, and a tad sweeter than Oyédo, having not only more meat on the bones, but no jarring base notes that snapped you out of the otherwise sunny disposition the scent was supposed to deliver unto you. I think Diptyque should have left this one as a candle and room spray to be honest, but enough people loved it so here it is, in a form that you can douse on yourself. It's a real shame too because I rather enjoy the opening, even if it has very little yuzu that I can recognize, and if they had found a better base for this scent, I might actually have enjoyed it. As Oyédo stands, all I get after 30 minutes is nasty powdery orange that reminds of the kid's medicine I used to hate taking as a child, and I can't really sign off on that. You might see things differently and may not pick up on the irritating base as much, so I still recommend testing Oyédo, which is thankfully pretty common at all Diptyque counters and easy to test. Thumbs down.