Sangre Dulce
Strangers Parfumerie (2019)

This fragrance has a sweet, musky honey scent that sets it apart from the generic sweet fragrances commonly found in department stores. Although civet is listed as a note, it does not have an animalic or unpleasant aroma. While ylang-ylang is a listed note, it is not very noticeable in this scent.

Performance is good and it can last for a full work day. This fragrance has a generic sweet scent that is suitable for any gender, although its sweetness may lean it towards a more feminine direction. Maple syrup and brown sugar are unisex notes, so the fragrance is still appropriate for all. The strawberry note is not prominent but is blended well with the sugary notes.

Overall, this fragrance is a blend of musky sugar and maple, which is a really pleasant combination. However, if you already have enough sweet fragrances, it may not be necessary to add this one to your collection, but it could be a good choice if you don't have any basic sugar sweet fragrances yet.

Sangre Dulce is darker in tone than So Fetch, but no less weird or interesting, or ultimately, wearable. Immediately on application, there is something here that reminds me of something Lush or BPAL would make: burned sugar crossed with the headshop murkiness of amber cubes and dragon's blood incense, or some mysterious dried herb concoction in a burlap sack. It smells very indie – not in the super-fancy artisanal sense of the word, but more in the sense of the Etsy crowd dropping a Solstice or Hexennacht release of perfumes honoring the Moon or witches or something. Not saying that to knock it, by the way – many of my favorite perfumes are indie oils from the latter category (I am just not into the witchy side of things).

I smell in Sangre Dulce a whole host of confusing but really pleasing notes that seem to hang together very well – burned sugar, rubber galoshes, sugar mashed into dirt, bathtub booze, and in the far drydown, something that smells like over-baked wheatgrass and granola bars (maybe this is where that protein bar ended up). If Luca Turin were to smell this, I'd imagine he'd find a way to praise Prin Lomros for his off-the-wall thinking, in the same way he (almost wistfully) loves the Constantine father and son duo at Lush for having the guts to just throw everything into a pot as a mad experiment and see what works (“Someone seems to be having a lot of fun over there” as he might say, in that impish way of his).

A basic way to describe Sangre Dulce is to say that it smells like sugar cubes and burned wheat that took a wrong turn somewhere and fell down a dark cellar into a pot of hooch, dragging with it some Converse sneakers and a vial of herbal folk medicine. In fact, I'm pretty sure that was the creative brief for Lush's All Good Things.

This is not a scent for the timid or those for whom "animalic" is a turn-off. I'm not a fan of gourmands and almost passed my sample of this over to a friend who is, but I tried it on a whim and wow! This is what happens when you take Mugler's Angel, throw an exquisitely beautiful silk floral scarf around her neck and plonk her in a leather booth in your favourite dive bar. Animalic gourmand to perfection.