Straight Up Seduction: Amouage Epic Woman

Those of you have been reading for a while know that I have used the term "stealth scent" to mean a scent that sneaks into your good graces.  Denyse of Grain de Musc recently used the term more poetically in her review of Prada's L'Eau Ambree -- for her, "stealth scent" is one that you realize is about you, you wonder where it is coming from, and realize...it is you.

Either way, cloaking is involved.  A obscuring of effect before a reveal.

Epic, my friends, has come to get you.  Cloakless.  And it does its job.  No pretense, no veneer.  Straight up after your love purse.  And knows how to get there.

It may not be the best trip you'll ever have, but you won't regret it.  It will be good.  And it knows it.  Put on the Barry White, and prepare to smell your oud.

Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father.* 


Up until this day, I would have said:  I don't know nothing 'bout enjoying no oud, Ms. Scarlett.

Epic opens with traditional beauty, then slides the oud right between something honeyish and some rose -- which, by the way, ends up being bread that is neither rose nor honey but something gold -- and you never quite rest on one or the other.  Which for me is a good thing, because oud has a way of poking a dagger up the back of my sinuses right to a headache spot, and rose can create an oppressive cloud that strangles almost the same exact spot like some sort of blankety anaconda.

But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin . . .*


Somehow, you put it all together here, and the oud just keeps things heightened as you relax more and more into the gold.

In any other incarnation, I would have focused on the oud, because whether mild or prominent, oud has always gone to the camphor spot.  (Not a happy place for me.) The other half, the warmed sweetened dirty rose, would have been just too much--too thick, too heavy.  Put the two together...hello.

Epic is that guy who looks you in the eye and says "yeah."  And you say "c8#p," 'cause he's right.  Wrong, but right.

This is one of those scents, by the way, that invites both huffing AND enjoying its hovering presence.  The huff reveals the magic, puts the elements into relief; the close waft has that "hey, what smells so good?" element to it.  If you descend through the cloud to try to get close, it will move from soft focus to sharp.

Not that you'll mind.

Epic, I give a damn.  Dangit.

* quotes are from Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind.