Longexact's Review of Hermèssence Agar Ebène by Hermès

There's a particular kind of fragrance nerd who is very afraid that someone will think they're wearing a feminine fragrance (the horror!). Such people are in an aesthetic cage of their own making, wearing only fragrances with a very small and constrained set of notes, all of which are along the woody/smoky axis. It's for these people that Hermes has created the sad and generic niche-by-numbers Agar Ebène, which barely qualifies as a smell, let alone a fragrance - and one that costs about $250 per bottle at that. If I had smelled this blind I would have thought it was a Le Labo, which is the unkindest thing I can say about a masculine niche fragrance. Between this and the equally bad Cèdre Sambac it appears that something dreadful is happening with masculine fragrances at Hermes. (By contrast, the new floral Hermessences are quite good, especially Musc Pallida.)

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